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There have been 260 items by bill.french (Search limited from 03-July 23)

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#5149 LCDKeypad 16x2 HD44780 Shield

Posted by bill.french on 21 November 2010 - 10:17 PM in Project Showcase

Can you elaborate on the keypad/analog input issue?

#5970 Anyone have a clever hex->byte conversion routine?

Posted by bill.french on 10 December 2010 - 01:07 PM in Netduino 2 (and Netduino 1)

Thank you for the explanation, Chuckie. It seems hard enough for me to find stuff normally, and now I'm up against hidden stuff?? :unsure:

#6829 Etched my first shield PCB...

Posted by bill.french on 02 January 2011 - 02:00 PM in Project Showcase

I've done it several times, I've been surprised with how easy it is, actually, almost like magic. There's usually some issue with the traces, but a sharpie can correct it. If the toner transfer is too "rough" to correct, you can just clean it off and do it again. Acetone for cleaning never worked for me (maybe my wife's acetone is not actually acetone?), so I use Brakleen which should be available at walmart or any autoparts store.

PulsarProfix has lots of information, as well as some special paper i would love to try, as removing the paper seems to be the most problematic for me.

This site: http://www.riccibitti.com/pcb/pcb.htm probably is the closest to what I actually did.

#6480 Interfacing with a USB Flash drive?

Posted by bill.french on 24 December 2010 - 05:10 PM in General Discussion

here's another interesting unit on Amazon, with a 2TB limit:

http://www.amazon.co...3210173&sr=1-16

I'm thinking you could stage a file on the local SD card, then FTP it to the nas device on a background thread.

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#6466 Interfacing with a USB Flash drive?

Posted by bill.french on 24 December 2010 - 12:47 PM in General Discussion

what kind of data are you storing? what kind of time period are you dealing with? Maybe a compression algorithm? Something like this and a ND+ could get you to 8GB? http://www.addonics....s/nas/nasu2.asp

#4547 MFToolkit - new release (VS2010 support / .NET MF 4.1)

Posted by bill.french on 07 November 2010 - 12:02 AM in Netduino Plus 2 (and Netduino Plus 1)

Is there a link to just what exactly the above MFToolkit is? I was not able to find a site that stated a simple overview of what it is and why it exists. Thanks!

#6814 Custom Data Visualization Components

Posted by bill.french on 02 January 2011 - 04:21 AM in General Discussion

I registered the domain name "stopreinventingthewheel.com"... some day it will be dedicated to all the wheels I've reinvented... and reinvented... lol concerning visualization, make sure you explore the microsoft charting controls, I believe they are a derivative of the Dundas controls and come w/ Visual Studio and are pretty robust. http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/mschart

#6828 Custom Data Visualization Components

Posted by bill.french on 02 January 2011 - 01:19 PM in General Discussion

If you want to see a (poorly written) sample, check out my graphing code: http://forums.netdui...ch__1#entry4637 I am using it to graph from the network, I was also messing with threads, so the code could be easily simplified.

#6819 Custom Data Visualization Components

Posted by bill.french on 02 January 2011 - 05:03 AM in General Discussion

I put some thought into it... for whatever reason, I seem to always be reinventing the wheel. Data visualization is one of those areas I explored, but the available tools are way more mature and advanced than anything i could do in my free time. Not to discourage you-- it's a neat and ever evolving area (data visualization) but many of the basics are "done" and available for free in VS.

#6431 So, what's on everyone's Christmas List??

Posted by bill.french on 23 December 2010 - 02:07 PM in General Discussion

The items chortik mentioned look good too. Plus.... dangerousprototypes.com - that's almost as good a name as Secret Labs.

i didn't notice the "dangerousprototypes" .. i was too busy laughing at "Bus Pirate"... LOL

Edit: i should add that I think the stuff chortik linked is actually very cool, but the names are funny, which I appreciate. The sexyness of the Saleae wins for me, though.

#6393 So, what's on everyone's Christmas List??

Posted by bill.french on 22 December 2010 - 07:23 PM in General Discussion

You can usually find very nice stepper motors in printers (larger motors) and 3.5" floppy disk drives

If Santa sees this and leaves me a floppy drive, I am going to be pissed.

#4580 MFToolkit - new release (VS2010 support / .NET MF 4.1)

Posted by bill.french on 07 November 2010 - 02:08 PM in Netduino Plus 2 (and Netduino Plus 1)

Very awesome, thank you!

#4562 2D Motion Capture, early results

Posted by bill.french on 07 November 2010 - 04:52 AM in Project Showcase

While I was admiring your project, and your strategic use of .Dispose(), I couldn't help but think the displayed frame from your youtube video looked like you were trying to punch Beaker, but missed.

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#6382 So, what's on everyone's Christmas List??

Posted by bill.french on 22 December 2010 - 06:25 PM in General Discussion

Realizing that not everyone celebrates Christmas, and it's only a few days away anyway:

If you had a list of stuff that a magical creature would pick from and deliver to you via your chimney Saturday morning, what would be on it??

Here's mine:

www.stepgenie.com - stepper motor controller
a stepper motor to experiment with
an LCD display
netduino mini
Make magazine subscription
and since i've been really good this year: http://www.saleae.com/logic/ logic probe system everyone keeps talking about

Please note: no socks on this list!!

#6392 So, what's on everyone's Christmas List??

Posted by bill.french on 22 December 2010 - 07:22 PM in General Discussion

That seeeduino is neat! What's your idea for it?

#4565 2D Motion Capture, early results

Posted by bill.french on 07 November 2010 - 05:37 AM in Project Showcase

Glad you enjoyed my very advanced Paint.Net skills!

Thinking about it (the project) some more, the datasheet says 5us is "typical"... (and since you say you got the pwm call wrong anyway) which makes me wonder if you could have gotten away with something like:

out1.Write(true);
out1.Write(false);

which, according to here, gets you a 60us pulse.

... I also wonder if you had gpio pins to spare, you could you one pin in output mode to fire the pulse, then another pin in input mode (both tied to the sig pin on the ping thing) to read the returning pulse, then you wouldn't have to worry about .Dispose()'s timing.

#8085 Replace analog pot with Netduino using PWM

Posted by bill.french on 22 January 2011 - 02:25 AM in Netduino 2 (and Netduino 1)

Instead of a motor control board (some sort of shield, I am imagining?), you might pick up an RC ESC and control that with pwm. Http://www.hobbyking.com has tons of cheap stuff. What toy RC is it?

#9013 Pull Up/Down Resistors, and when to use them?

Posted by bill.french on 04 February 2011 - 09:53 PM in General Discussion

Thanks Bill! Thats exactly what I needed!

What about to drive a relay? If I were to go with a pull up resistor, wouldn't I have to switch from a NPN to a PNP? I'm thinking specifically about about the circuit at http://www.arduino.c...ning/relays.pdf

Or am I just over-engineering this, and the arduino relay circuit is fine?

Thank you for your help!

Sorry, not following you - I don't see where a pull up or pull down resistor would come into play. You do need a resistor to the base of the transistor, but that is not a "pull" in either direction. You *might* want to use a pull down to overcome the momentary pull up resistor during boot up.

#9004 Pull Up/Down Resistors, and when to use them?

Posted by bill.french on 04 February 2011 - 07:32 PM in General Discussion

I guess a basic guideline is if you need to read a 0 or 1 reliably, and your circuit has an "open" state, say the reed switch, then you'll want to use a pull up/down resistor, depending on the circumstances. The problem with an open state is that the input will be open to the environment, so any stray charges can make the input go to 0 or 1 unpredictably. In your case, knowing nothing else about your circuit, you can probably get away with a "pull up" resistor instead, which the netduinos have built in and available for activation via software. This will simplify your circuit.

#8018 Replace analog pot with Netduino using PWM

Posted by bill.french on 20 January 2011 - 07:11 PM in Netduino 2 (and Netduino 1)

Can you better describe what you are trying to do, what you're wiring up, etc? I have some ideas.

#6476 Solid Graphic LCD

Posted by bill.french on 24 December 2010 - 04:33 PM in Netduino 2 (and Netduino 1)

Well, I don't know, but that LCD you linked is pretty amazing! From the comments:

So let me get this straight. This thing is a color LCD with built in controller, backlight circuitry, microSD socket which is compatible with both low capacity and high capacity cards, AND! it basically has a user programmable microcontroller with 10k of program space and 2 GPIO lines in addition to all the on-board control lines for interfacing with the LCD?

Certainly you can change the configuration from SGC to GFX and vice versa. See the links below with individual configurations,

Also, another screen to consider if anyone stumbles across this thread:
http://www.dfrobot.c...&product_id=135

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