[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 Saturday night, [...]
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 Arduino [...]
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 100% [...]
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 date is " [...]
March 24, 2009
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, [...]
March 3, 2009
Thanks to a helpful suggestion by user DanP, I have increased the effective resolution of the latitude and longitude values returned in TinyGPS. The get_position method now returns values in units of 10-5 degrees, a 10-fold increase in resolution. Note that if you use use the old get_position, you will have to make some minor [...]
February 20, 2009
Ladyada tested NewSoftSerial and made some improvements to the code, contributed a “goodnight moon” sketch, and tested the library (successfully) with the Atmega328p processor. Thanks, ladyada! Go buy a bunch of processors from her, please. They give you twice the RAM and nearly twice the flash space. I posted the new library. …goodnight moon. [...]
February 17, 2009
Check out the new PString library. PString is a very lightweight string class that derives from Print, so you can use it to render text to string buffers the same way you would to the Serial port or to a LiquidCrystal device. Try it out. Feedback welcome. Mikal
October 25, 2009
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