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James Lewis

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What was one of the first things you were taught, when learning to program?  “Comment Your Code!”  And of course, like all programming students, you ignored that advice.  Or, if you are like me, you made vague comments as the lines of “variable called var.”

Tonight I opened up some code I haven’t touched in two years.  Code that when I wrote it, made perfect sense to me… at the time.

The code was for my binary clock project, BinBoo.  So I need your help, check out the code below and see if you can help me remember what it does!

Early in my engineering career, I worked for an oscilloscope company in the high performance product line. The last project I worked on was defining the features and requirements of a 33GHz (that’s giga-, not mega-) scope. This experience gave me a strong appreciation for processing digitized signals, especially those in the RF range. So when I picked up my first Software Defined Radio (SDR), you can imagine how much fun it was to use… with the help of some open source hardware.

Modern smartphones have eliminated the need for a number of devices.  Often I use my smartphone as a scanner (CamScanner), car GPS, voice recorder, security token, pedometer, light controller, and oh yeah, a phone.   My electronics bench is currently home to a Bench Power Supply, an Oscilloscope, and a Function Generator.  While good instruments, they should worried because they’re going to get replaced with one device: National Instrument’s VirtualBench.

You might also be interested in my Full Video Review of the VirtualBench!