code, circuits, & construction

Rob Faludi just turned me on to CoolTerm, a serial terminal app for OSX and Windows. It looks like a nice addition, and is cross platform, which is handy for teaching; no need to reference different apps on different platforms. I’ve only tried it out a little, but so far, it’s nice. You can have multiple ports open in multiple windows, and you can see bytes in ASCII or hex. It’d be nice to see them in decimal too, but that’s just a wish.

Coming late to the game, I’m trying out a Bluetooth Mate from SparkFun with an Arduino Lilypad.Overall, it’s a nice Bluetooth radio to use with microcontrollers.  A few thoughts on getting it working:

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Matt Mets has written a nice Nikon remote control library for Arduino. I used it to make a motion trigger and intervalometer. It looks like this:

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I’m making some changes to this blog. I’ve been unhappy about the fact that all the code is static, not the code I use every day. Instead, I want a nice code repository, so whatever I write on my machine can be published directly, and if I update it, the updates end up here. I would also like syntactical highlighting of the code. And now, ta dah! It’s all done. Here’s what I did, for your reference and my own, because I’ll forget next time I need to update it.

So from now on, new code on this blog will look like this:

void setup() {
 Serial.begin(9600); 
}

void loop() {
  Serial.println("Hello from Tom!");
}

And it’ll all be updated whenever I make changes.  Exciting, isn’t it?

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