Friday, October 28, 2011

Hey Microsoft!

Give me a Windows Phone 7, and I will port Sedition. I promise! I love C#, I love XNA, and I've got an app that's architecturally fit for an Android --> WP7 port.  

That is all.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

In defense of Ada in Defense.

I read an interesting article about the F-22 Raptor fighter on Wired today, and it lead me to check out the Wikipedia page for it and I ran across a startling statement. The bill for upgrading America's fleet of 185 aircrafts' hardware and software has doubled from the original $8 billion to $16 billion. According to a defense analyst, the primary cause for this increase is the use of the Ada programming language for the system software.


What?

Friday, October 21, 2011

What could you build with only 7400 chips?

The 7400 competition at Dangerous Prototypes is amazing, I had for a nanosecond considered it, but thought that one couldn't make anything as cool as what you could do with a microcontroller. Boy was I wrong.

-P

Energy Micro EFM32 "Tiny Gecko" Developer Board

I recently attended a seminar featuring the EFM32 Gecko processor from Energy Micro, an ARM Cotex M3 architecture based chip, with a focus on ultra low energy applications. I enjoyed the seminar a lot, though I'm not sure if that was due in part to the change of pace from my day job. The seminar was 20 minutes from my house, and attendees recieved a EFM32 starter kit.


Energy Micro is a relatively new chip manufacture based in Norway.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Latest Developments.



I'll keep this one short and sweet....

For those of you keeping score at home:
  • My day job is especially hectic, we have milestones approaching, and in the video game industry especially, that means you work long hours.
  • Haven't touched Sedition in a few weeks. I need to get back to it.
  •  I started back up with my .Net micro framework work. I've now got 5 Olimex LPC h2294 boards in anticipation of doing neat stuff, all with a rich embedded environment like the dnmf. I'm currently getting re acquainted with what I left off almost 9 months ago. I have a SD driver, that does not work (I plane to sic one of my logic analyzers on that), and I've started writing a Nokia 5110 LCD driver.
  • Still sometimes daydream about writing code in Scala. Or Cowbell(tm) :)
  • Oh, and I just scored an STM32F4 Discovery Board (currently free! At least to US addresses, not sure about everyone else). This thing looks to be amazing, the specs put the 2294's to shame (to be fair, the 2294 has been around for quite a while, the Olimex boards are still a great value at Sparkfun.). The least I can do is make a blog post about my experience with it. I really want to use the DSP capabilities of it, mostly because I know nothing about DSP.