TL866 + MiniPro under Linux

I've long been a fan of the extremely useful and affordable TL866 despite its lack of support for a bunch of TSOP flash chips I've recently been looking at.

A mild inconvenience though is the dependency on Windows. For ages I've kept an old netbook around pretty much entirely for the TL866 but I've recently discovered you can run the device quite happily from Linux thanks to the efforts of a couple of guys who've posted their code on github.

Ciseco Slice of Radio, SRF and AT commands.

If you've used a Slice of Radio or any of the Ciseco RF modules like the SRF or RFu328, then you might be sad to hear that Ciseco/WirelessThings are no more. Unfortunately, that also means that the documentation doesn't exist any longer either, as their web presence disappeared.  While I don't have much documentation, I did create a list of AT commands that the SRF and XRF radio modules accept.

Fellowes 99ci repair part 1

I picked up a reconditioned Fellowes 99ci shredder a while ago as it was significantly cheaper than a brand new model. For a while it worked well enough but as shredding isn't something I do particularly often by the time it started to have issues it was of course out of warranty.

MX150 board issues

If you're one of the people who has downloaded the MX150 board files I uploaded earlier, please accept my apologies. I realised that I've managed to break the PPS mapping on the board definition files which makes working with the board more frustrating than it should be. Once I've fixed the problem and tested it thoroughly, I will make the files available again and put up a new post.

The bootloader itself is not affected by this, so any chips you've flashed it to will be fine.

MX150 "board"

I said that I would publish the bootloader, board definition files and pinout map for the PIC32MX150B chip within the MPIDE environment, and here it is. You can find the hex file for programming a blank chip, the source for the bootloader, and the three board files ready to go. The part I've been using these with looks like this so far:

Minimal PIC32MX150 setup!

Toying with PIC32MX150

For a project I'm toying with, I've needed a microcontroller with three comparators onboard. In this case, I've been playing with 28 pin PIC32 device, specifically the PIC32MX150F128B. Admittedly, this is mostly because I already have a few in the parts box! In a nutshell, you get 128K of FLASH, 32K of RAM, 5 PWM pins, 2 UARTs, 2 SPI/I2S interfaces, 20 GPIO pins, a charge time measurement unit and a 1Msps ADC with a 10 input mux, and no need for a crystal. In this post, I'm going to run through the PIC32-avrdude-bootloader, and MPIDE setup I needed to do to get this part up and running.