| mhcom@sundial.com | 27 posts
There is so much to report that I hardly know where to begin. The biggest news is that I have begun actively delivering commissions! If you want to finally get your hands on a second-generation programmable Reverse Geocache™ puzzle, keep reading. PCBs This winter I began developing a new specialized PCB (“printed circuit board”) that [...]
February 21, 2010
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 [...]
January 7, 2010
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); ... [...]
November 9, 2009
[Author's note: This is the third post in a real-life story that ultimately took a full year and four chapters (1, 2, 3, 4) to tell. Read them all, then browse through the other surprising puzzle box stories that have popped up along the way.] The puzzle box continues to generate lots of interest. This [...]
October 25, 2009
[Author's note: This is the second post in a real-life story that ultimately took a full year and four chapters (1, 2, 3, 4) to tell. Read them all, then browse through the other surprising puzzle box stories that have popped up along the way.] The Puzzle Box story has a delightful second act. It’s [...]
October 9, 2009
There is a cool new addition to the website today — a project I call the Reverse Geocache™ Puzzle. 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 [...]
May 21, 2009
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 [...]
May 2, 2009
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 [...]
April 23, 2009
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 [...]
April 17, 2009
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 [...]
The evolution of the Reverse Geocache™
July 22, 2010
24