Building a PDA from scratch

Extremely powerful ARM microcontrollers have been around for ages now, but only recently have they been available for just a few dollars with a good enough toolchain for some serious development work. [Jose] wanted to develop something awesome with an ARM chip he had lying around, so he built a PDA (Spanish, translation) that can be used as a … Read the rest

Labor day weekend water gun spectacular

In the US, summer is marked by two holidays. In late May, Memorial day traditionally marks the the beginning of summer, the opening of public pools, and the day shopping malls are invaded by scores of petulant teenagers. In early September, Labor day marks the traditional end of summer, a great weekend to fire up the grill, and finally – … Read the rest

Lazy Labor day educational time. Watch Cornell’s microcontroller courses.

 

C’mon, you know you’re not really going to do much today. You might as well spend that time learning some skills instead of watching funny cats. The Cornell ECE lectures on microcontrollers (ECE 4760 and ECE5760), taught by [Bruce Land], are available online for free.

Not only do you get to enjoy these two courses, but there are videos Read the rest

Operating systems development with the Raspberry Pi

Even though the Raspberry Pi has, from the very beginning, been touted as an educational computer, we’ve seen neither hide nor hare of coursework, lesson plans, or even computer sciencey tutorials using the Raspi. We’re guessing academia works at a much slower pace than the average hardware hacker, but [Alex Chadwick] at Cambridge University has managed to put together an … Read the rest