News and Updates

When News breaks, ... we fix it

Spring is here -- web connected thermostat

Spring is here -- web connected thermostat

Posted on 27th Mar 2019

I've been doing measurements on my heating system for about the last month. We are a couple days into spring, but still have snow expected this week, though this might be the last winter storm. So its a good time to look at the almost 35 days of data, which will tell about what to expect for the p...

Serial download

Serial download

Posted on 21st Mar 2019

For our C users we use NXP's ISP serial download. In order for that to work we need to control 2 lines - one for RESET and one for ISP_BOOT. This is also the method Flash Magic uses for their loaders. We do produce a USB dongle based on an FTDI chip to do this, but it is a very low volume part for us, and therefore expensive. So we are always looking for alternatives.

One less clock to change

Posted on 10th Mar 2019

It is gratifying to see something you built work as designed, even though you may have tested it many times before. With day light saving time coming up last week, I took that to spur me to finish off the design of my WiFi web connected clock. During that time I changed the program to go out and check the time about 3 AM each day. That handles calibrating the clock crystal as well as the bi-annual time changes.

KiCAD is a winner

KiCAD is a winner

Posted on 3rd Mar 2019

For many years, I was looking for a new PCB layout package. And from time to time I would try one based on somone else's recommendation. Invariably I was unimpressed and fell back on my old standby TraxMaker that I purchased back in the 90s. That too was a recommendation, but its chief advantage was that you could start using it right away import virtually any format netlist and start laying out. Its user interface was simple and followed most other conventions, and push a button at the end and get a set of gerber files ready to fab.

BASIC with inline assembly

Posted on 26th Feb 2019

We have always had rudimentary inline assembly support in ARM BASIC. When adding multitasking support we expanded that capability. Originally the keyword __ASM__(code) would compile that 16 bit code instruction into the BASIC program. Now __ASM__(code) also supports 32 bit instructions, and _...

Tooltip hints added to the IDE

Tooltip hints added to the IDE

Posted on 20th Feb 2019

Tooltip or mouse over hints have been added to our IDEs. One of our users has been modifying our BASICtools IDE for his own use or way of working. One feature he added was tooltips, something we did not know was available in TclTk. Well we aren't too proud to be inspired (i.e. copy with permission). So we added that as well.