Like a raft or rudderless boat

I haven't been a very good blogger over the past few years and it is unlikely that I will improve over the years to come. In fact I have had internal turmoil throughout 2013 as to whether or not to post a final entry informing those who may stumble upon this lonely site or to delete the whole site all together. I may have stated this before but it is simply because I am in a different state of mind from when I started blogging in 2006 or I could even go as far as to say I am a whole different person :-p. Sorry for the nerd joke, I hope someone got it but anyway lets come off this topic.

A while back I blogged about getting a clone of the original Arduino board and it was just as quickly banished to collecting dust on my desk as I grew board of some of the limitations(both hardware and software) I found with it. So I moved from the AVR camp and moved to PIC. If you are unfamiliar in the MCU world this is the equivalent to the following analogies:

• Moving from Intel to AMD
• Moving from Nvidia to ATI
• Moving from IOS to Android
• Moving from a Toyota Supra to Nissan Skyline
• Moving from a Mitzubishi Evolution to Subaru Impreza
• Moving from a frozen yogurt preference to icecream

or vice-versa depending on which camp you sit in. The PIC 12f683, 8pin dip MCUs pictured below, forced me to learn assembly. This is a very time intensive hobby so I didn't get a chance to fully utilize all of its peripherals in my projects before I grew tired of tediously moving registers around, loading w, working only with 8bit registers, not having hardware multiply/divide operations and the manual memory management so I bought some more advanced PIC MCUs that could handle the C programming language.

Apparently I bought low voltage chips that required a special programmer, I tried using a pikit3 and didn't have much success. I didn't really try that hard but I moved on, I realized that Arduinos were dirt cheap if you bought them in the mini flavors as pictured above. The programmer in the photo is some generic serial type one and it doesn't work with the usb to rs232 cables so I need a real serial port to use it. Since we are on the topic of this photo lets take some time to admire my work of making a 4 braid ttl uart cable for communicating with these breadboard platforms lol

Hopefully the MCU aspect of my electronics hobby doesn't fall to its usual fate of collecting dust on my desk or draw somewhere for 2014, I am waiting for the delivery of a few other items that should make for some useful projects: 2.4GHz wireless transceivers, RTCs, temperature sensors, microphones, accelerometers and gyroscopes.

Sorry to start off the year with such a geeky post, hopefully my next post is this year and soon(I only did one post last year) will be about new years resolutions or lack of any for me. So what are your resolutions for this year?