Browsing All Posts filed under »Uncategorized«

A Flurry of Puzzle Box Activity

July 22, 2010

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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 […]

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 […]

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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[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 […]

Puzzle Box – Chapter 2

October 25, 2009

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[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 […]

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.  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 […]

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 […]

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 […]