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James Lewis

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Engineering Resource: Web Equation

Documentation, Documentation.  Documentation.

It is always critical to document progress is a log book.  If using an electronic tool like Evernote or a Blog, it can be difficult to document equations or calculations you’ve made in a project.

Vision Objects has put together a demo tool that allows for writing your equation in freehand which then uses image recognition to covert into LaTeX code.

For convenience, there is a direct link to WolframAlpha to calculate the equation.  A preview of the LaTeX Equation is provided by the open-source MathJax javascript rendering engine.

Web Equation.

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Blog

Renesas Promotion Board for RL78/G13 | Renesas Electronics America

RL78 Kit from Renesis

Renesas is offering a promotion version of their RL78 microcontroller.  This offer is only available to their Sample Component account holders, but the process for signing up for a sample account is pretty straightforward.  (There may be EAR restrictions with this board.)

If you are looking for a powerful processor that is an alternative to PIC or AVR processors, this board might be worth a look.

[i]Note:  It appears samplecomponents.com might have been compromised at some point in the past.  Google throws a warning page up.  Proceed at your own discretion.[/i]

Renesas Promotion Board for RL78/G13 | Renesas Electronics America.

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Arduino

Arduino: Getting Real Time Help

While the Arduino Project Team provides their official Arduino forums, sometimes real-time help is just a bit better.  When that is the case, I encourage you to visit the freenode.net IRC channel, #arduino.  While as of today it is not an official channel, there are a number of great people available to help.

You can find me under the nick “baldengineer”, big surprise, I know.  Others like kline, Yoston and pwillard are also excellent people to ping with questions.

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Arduino

Arduino: Sending and Receiving Multi-Digit Integers

Arduino's Basic Serial Monitor

When Serial data is transmitted to an Arduino, it is sent one byte at a time.  Even though you might type “123” in the Serial Monitor, that’s not quite what is sent.  Instead the bytes “1” then “2” then “3” are sent.  Once received into a buffer on the Arduino, these individual bytes need to be reassembled into something useful.

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