For Christmas my partner bought me an Apple bluetooth keyboard to go with my iPad Mini together with my other Apple devices (I am such a fan-girl). Since then I’ve been playing with it and finding out just how much I can control with it.
iPad Mini and Apple Bluetooth keyboard
When I’m developing software on small and embedded devices I tend to network them by using a CAT-6 cable between a network port on my Mac and the device and enable Internet Sharing via System Preferences. Unfortunately OS X always selects 192.168.2.0 as the network address and this may class with other networks on your network. Recently I found out how to change this. Read the rest of this entry »
There is a Flickr group for the Open Source Hardware User Group (OSHUG) and photos from this years camp have been uploaded to it. The photos below are courtesy of Carrier Detect. The group can be found at http://www.flickr.com/groups/oshug/pool/.
Here are the slides to the talk I gave at Open Source Hardware Camp 2012 here in the UK.
I do a lot of my development these days in VMs (various OSes), one for each project. I have two different physical machines I work on, my iMac and my MacBook. Today I finally got around to setting up a git server on the iMac (its backed up with Timemachine) to make code sharing across machines, virtual and real, easier. Since I’m in the office at work I did it all remotely on the command line over ssh. Read the rest of this entry »
I am currently working on a project that comprises several components individually managed in SVN. These components are built and then linked in to the final binary. To makes things easier I wrote a release script that creates an editable commit message with the SVN revisions of the components and commits the final binary. I thought it might be useful to others so generalised it.
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This will be my first blog post in a very long time. Life has been busy and, in my day job, productive. Unfortunately this has meant that activities outside of work have been somewhat curtailed. But today I am ‘bunking off’ early as it is the monthly PHP NW meeting in Manchester so I am on a train heading across the country to it. This is giving me a chance to write this! Read the rest of this entry »
The BBC Microcomputer is 30 years old. The BBC News web site had an article about it but from the article you would think that only males benefited from it. Well it wasn’t just the boys who had fun with them! (Photo © Anachrocomputer) Read the rest of this entry »
As part of my BBC Micro PC project (more about this later) I need to turn the keyboard in a BBC Micro in to a USB hid device. I could just rip the insides out of a PC USB keyboard and solder wires on to the back off all the key switches but that seems somewhat messy. So I decided to design a micro-controller circuit to read the keyboard and to appear as a standard USB HID device. The neatest solution is to have the micro-controller drivng the keyboard circuitry the same was as the BBC Micro main board does. This post explains how the keyboard circuit works. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m currently developing a new project. Its a bluetooth enabled bracelet. I wanted to write an iPhone app to control it. However, much as I like my iPhone 4, Apple’s policy about locking the thing down sucks. So I then looked at writing an Android application for my G1. The problem with that is that bluetooth support only arrived in Android 2.0 and T-Mobile/HTC ceased upgrades at 1.6 on the G1. Since my G1 is two years old and out of contract I decided to be brave and upgrade it to Android 2.2. Note the G1 is called the HTC Dream in many markets.
