Puzzle Box Opens!

February 21, 2010

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Hurrah! I’m very pleased to announce the first ever successful opening of a Reverse Geocache™ Puzzle Box. (If you don’t know what a Reverse Geocache is, you should read this first.) The event occurred Saturday night, January 30th, in Austin, Texas, USA. Alas, it wasn’t the famous box that opened – that one is still sitting sadly [...]

New Year Treat: NewSoftSerial 10

January 7, 2010

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NewSoftSerial 10 is available for testing. There are a number of fun new features to play with, including support for 20MHz processors and Arduino siblings like the Teensy and Teensy++.  I’ve also added a destructor (and an end()) so that you can employ temporary NewSoftSerial objects, for example: if (need_to_check_GPS) { NewSoftSerial gpsconn(6, 3); ... } [...]

Puzzle Box 3: The Voyeuristic World

November 9, 2009

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[Next read the most recent chapter in the puzzle box story.] The puzzle box continues to generate lots of interest.  This week I encountered it in two different geocaching podcasts, a Serbian blog, and Daniel Soltis’ talk at Playful ‘09 in London.  I’ve fielded calls from network TV channels, film producers, engineers, and machine shops all [...]

Puzzle Box - Chapter 2

October 25, 2009

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[Next read chapter 3 in the puzzle box story.] The Puzzle Box story has a delightful second act. It’s Saturday night, five weeks to the day since the wedding, and despite the recent firestorm of publicity, I still haven’t heard whether my friends have managed to open the Reverse Geocache Puzzle Box.  It’s certainly possible they are [...]

The Reverse Geocache Puzzle ™

October 9, 2009

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There is a cool new addition to the website today — a project I call the Reverse Geocache Puzzle (tm).  It’s a box that won’t open until its owner figures out where on earth to move it.  I built it for a friend who got married in France last month.  The software for this project incorporates [...]

Direct Port I/O in NewSoftSerial 9

May 21, 2009

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NewSoftSerial 9 is now available.  This is a major new release that replaces all the performance path pin reads and writes with direct Port I/O. What does that give you?  Well, a couple of things.  Most importantly, it makes NewSoftSerial more compatible with the latest Arduino release.  Changes to timings of digitalRead and digitalWrite in Arduino [...]

New NewSoftSerial coming

May 2, 2009

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Changes in the timing of digitalRead and digitalWrite on 0015 have degraded NewSoftSerial’s and AFSoftSerial’s performance on this platform. If you need software serial at higher baud rates, I recommend you stick with 0014 — at least until NewSoftSerial 9 comes out. The good news is that version 9 has been optimized heavily and it [...]

NewSoftSerial 8 for 8 (MHz)

April 23, 2009

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Over the last couple of weeks I’ve spent a fair number of hours in front of the logic analyzer, and the result is NewSoftSerial version 8. The major delta in this release is support for 8MHz processors. The half-speed clock makes accurate serial reception considerably more difficult, but NewSoftSerial 8 still manages to transmit with 100% [...]

New Streaming Library

April 17, 2009

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Thanks to Paul V. and Ben Combee for their useful suggestions on how to support line endings (C++ “endl”) and internal format manipulators, respectively, we now have a bona fide Streaming library. With it, you can now write code like this: Serial << "A is " << lettera << "." << endl; lcd << "The date is " [...]

New Flash library

March 24, 2009

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I wrote a new library, Flash, which abstracts away most of the complexity of PROGMEM programming. It provides String, Array, and Table types that make ROM-based data collections as easy to use as “normal” types. Each overrides the C++ [] operator, so to get at individual elements, one simply uses familiar array syntax. For example, [...]