When News breaks, ... we fix it
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.
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.
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 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.
Doing some analysis of my hydronics heating system.
Should have published some of this data long ago. But better late than never. I ran some very simple integer and floating point benchmarks on all the parts I could find that I have BASIC running on.
Yes, we just got a BASIC running on the Arduino Zero - SAMD21, and we are looking for beta testers, and gauging interest in adding this. We intend it to be a free download.
One of our super users, posed a question. He needed multi-tasking, and asked if it was possible. My first reaction was NO. So was my second reaction. I suggested using callbacks from interrupts, or using multiple processors or the LPC54102 dual CPU.
After a couple days, and learning curve on the ESP8266, the ARMstamp driven web enabled clock is up and in use!
OK digital clocks are no big deal, you can pick them up for cheap on Amazon, and that's what I did. So why would I do that? I wanted to build a clock that would read the time from the web so that I would never have to set it.