No post for last week because I didn’t have anything interesting to say.

Hacked my Rigol DS1052E to the 100 MHz firmware. Just had to place a file onto a USB drive, stick it in, hit one button. I had the newer firmware already which made it easy, older firmware has a more complicated upgrade procedure. I followed http://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/changing-the-rigol-ds1052e-to-ds1102e-using-usb-the-dummy-guide/msg275388/#msg275388

I assembled another nRF51 board. More work to be done. Interesting design this chip has, but it runs at a slow 16 MHz. This is great for battery life but it’s going to cause problems for timing NeoPixel signals.

Something funny about working with Bluetooth Low Energy stuff: Most vendors only provide Windows based tools for programming BLE firmware, while so far only iOS devices support BLE, and you need a Mac to write apps for iOS. (yes, I know Android 4.3 is coming but that is very rare right now, I’m still waiting for the Note 3)

Got a AVR XMEGA prototype up and mostly working.

NeoPixels working on Netduino, tutorial is up on Adafruit: http://learn.adafruit.com/using-neopixels-with-netduino.

Web server on Netduino is very easy. I found http://forums.netduino.com/index.php?/topic/575-updated-web-server/ which is my starting point. Good thing I am already proficient with HTTP and ASP.NET and stuff.

Trinket and Gemma are for sale on Adafruit now. There are very rare reports of people who cannot get them working on one computer, then it works on another computer, and then it starts working on the first computer. I narrowed it down to one extra RJMP instruction that the bootloader has to execute when it is fresh (it will RJMP to another RJMP instruction), and once you’ve used the bootloader once, the RJMP is changed to jump directly to where the second RJMP will jump, hence become a little faster, and the issue (USB signal timing issue) disappears and everything is happy. This means prior to being sole, the ATtiny should be loaded with an image of the bootloader combined with a user application, instead of just the bootloader itself.

I finished Saints Row 4, while fun, I don’t think it’s nearly as funny as Saints Row 3. Red Dead Redemption is pretty good so far.