scottyau

I love playing with routers and network gear in general - who doesn't?  In the past I've never run the same router at home for long while I swap them out with different software and/or hardware.  This has slowed a bit lately due to life, but hasn't completely stopped. I ran an early model WRT54G with DD-WRT for a while a number of years ago.  That was my last foray into DD-WRT (it's been pfsense and now routeros since).  I wanted to give DD-WRT another go and so started looking through my box of bits to see what I might have that would work.  After a bit of digging in the parts box and reading online I soon realised most of my gear would run DD-WRT, but a 'micro' build.  I'm interested in having a play with some of the extra stuff that DD-WRT has to offer so I needed something with a little more Flash and RAM. DD-WRT openly recommend a TP-Link TL-WR740N to start with, and for $19AUD from a local store it's a pretty awesome recommendation.  Gett...

Nowadays I'm a Python guy, so as per the previous post once I had the basics working with the BusPirate using it's inbuilt console I immediately went looking for Python based options for using the BusPirate.  I pretty quickly landed on pyBusPirate . After cloning the code I jumped straight into the SPI samples and pretty quickly realised that while I could read the Python - I didn't actually know why the code was doing what it was doing.  I had no idea why different bytes were being sent, or what was being returned as a result. So I took a breath and a step back.  I then went and read about the BusPirate in Biting mode , and then specifically SPI(Binary) mode . Things make much more sense now - why each byte is being sent and what's being returned (or expected to be returned).  Those links make it pretty clear what I need to do to setup the BusPirate in SPI with my required options for this particular chip. So I'm now looking at two main operations: ...

A while ago one of my best mates gave me a dev board that he had done some work with that he thought I might like to do something with.  It's sat on my shelf for quite a long time, but this week I decided that it would be my next project.  This is not intended to be a short project, but if it goes the way I hope it will, it should be a medium term one with both some hardware and software involved.  Time will tell. The board uses a ColdFire MCF52235  microcontroller, which has an SPI interface for programming called EzPort. "Stage one" of this project consists of being able to flash this micro with new firmware over SPI using my BusPirate .  Initially i'll need to figure out the connection and can then test it with the just a console to the BusPirate.  Once that works i'll need to write some code to get the programming working. According to the data sheet, to connect the BusPirate to the EzPort on the micro the following connections are required: ...

I hope anyone reading this got some time out over the Christmas/New year period to unwind. First off an update on the boat posted about previously.  We've had her out on the water a couple of times now and she runs great!  She hasn't skipped a beat thus far - so we're looking forward to having her our on the water a lot more for the rest of 2015. Now that the boat is fixed I've been spending the bit of spare time I get on two bits of electronics related fun.  The first is learning to use Eagle to design PCBs.  My main resource for this is this  book .  It's been fantastic.  I do intend to go right through to ordering some boards so when I get to that stage I'll post it here. The other piece is  this course .  I've completed all of the prior PyroEDU courses and think they are awesome.  If you are new to any of the subjects listed - the courses will take you through in a very hands on way with the most basic of hardware requirements....