Archive for November, 2010
GUIDemo – A full VGA Library for the Propeller
by firestorm_v1 on Nov.19, 2010, under Embedded devices, Hardware, How-To's, Microcontrollers
The Parallax VGA GUI Demo is great for adding a pre-built GUI for your projects. The bonus is that the drivers for using a PS/2 keyboard and mouse and a VGA display are pre-built and ready to run. With a little bit of configuration, you can add a well built UI to your application and make it easier to display output and receive input from the user.
In this article, I will demonstrate some of the basic options that are needed in order to get the GUI up and running. While our application is going to be turning on a few LEDs, once you have these basics down you should be able to use this article and build whatever user elements are required for your application. (continue reading…)
TI Launchpad Dev Kit for under $5!
by firestorm_v1 on Nov.05, 2010, under Hardware, Microcontrollers, Product Reviews
So many months ago (in June), Hackaday and Make were all abuzz about the TI Launchpad which is a new development platform centered around the TI MSP430 microprocessor. The most interesting thing aside from the processor spec itself was that the entire platform came under $5 for a professionally built development kit. I placed my order and in a week, I got a backorder slip and eventually forgot about it. (June is years ago for those of us with ADD.) Well even though I had forgotten about it, TI had not. A couple of days ago, I got a call from the apartment complex that it had arrived! Read on to find out what all’s in the box!
