xAppSoftware Blog

Written by Enrico Espinosa

From the end of 80’s important international companies operating in electronics looked for partnership to outsource the manufacturing activities. The intent of multinational companies operating in the telecom, automotive, IT business, was to leave the manufacturing activities to focus on their own core business. This strategic approach to business allowed international OEM firms to enter in the European market through commercial agreements and the acquisition of production sites. Their business model was to supply entire business unit products acquiring the manufacturing divisions. The target for the OEM was represented by multinational companies with leading technological products, and what it was happening met this expectation. The single technology design of family products allows the international OEMs to dedicate entire lines to a single customer emphasizing the specialization of their assets (human capital, and equipment). In addition, their competitive advantage were the high capital reserves to buy production sites and to cover costs of ramp-up manufacturing activities.

On 8th December 2011, ISO has ratified and published as ISO/IEC 9899:2011 the new C11 (C1x) standard for the C programming language. The major changes from the previous standard (C99), as written in the wikipedia, are the following:

The standard includes several changes to the C99 language and library specifications, such as:[6]

Alignment specification (_Alignas specifier, alignof operator, aligned_alloc function, <stdalign.h> header file)

The _Noreturn function specifier

Type-generic expressions using the _Generic keyword. For example, the following macro cbrt(x) translates to cbrtl(x), cbrt(x) or cbrtf(x) depending on the type of x:

#define cbrt(X) _Generic((X), long double: cbrtl, \

                              default: cbrt, \

                              float: cbrtf)(X)

How to use the MCP79410 Real Time Clock

In this article I'm going to show you how to use the MCP 79410 we have mounted on our boards.

• Temperature sensor and real time clock for Arduino
• A PIC 12f1840 developer board with mcp79410 RTC and tcn75 temperature sensor. 

The MCP79410 is a Real Time Clock (RTC) chip that uses a digital compensation of the time to realize an accurate clock/calendar. It has a programmable output line (it is possible to program up to two alarms), it can be backupped by an external battery (there is an ad hoc circuit), it has a small non volatile memory to store data and a small backupped SRAM.

The dev-team has a gift for you.. :

"@pod2g has created a terrific gift for iOS fans — an untethered 5.0.1 jailbreak for non-A5 devices! 

Many of you have already been following @pod2g’s blog where he’s been keeping everyone up to date on his progress.  And so you know that he recently decided to push the button on a release for all devices except the new iPhone4S and iPad2.  @pod2g’s untether involves two separate exploits and a few other “tricks” — and since he’s taken the @comex approach of doing nearly everything himself, you know his plate has been full these past few months!

One of the more diffcult job, while using the shell, is working with text files to filter their content.

In the following few lines you will find 3 different ways to remove all the duplicate lines from a text file.

First of all, I'll introduce three commands that are available on almost all of the linux distributions, and maybe in all Unix dialects:

uniq

Discard all but one of successive identical lines from INPUT (or standard input), writing to OUTPUT (or standard output).

We have developed this library to use the i2c bus on our 12f1840 development board.

http://www.xappsoftware.com/wordpress/?p=3523

http://www.xappsoftware.com/wordpress/?p=3428

Naturally it can be used also with our PICcoletta board and with other boards which use Microchip PICs. Leave a message to this post if you find useful this library or if you use this library with other PICs.

… an evolving index of practical subjects for the Arduino and Freeduino microcontrollers, as found in the Arduino site, Playground wiki, forum and that big WWW thing. Everything you read here will work on Arduino, the many versions of Freeduino, the Barebones and RBBB, the Boarduino, the iDuino and MAXserial, the eauDuino, the Jeenode, the many Arduino-compatible boards listed below, and of course the new-kids-on-the-block, the Sanguino, the Freeduino EPIC and the Arduino MEGA. Because of the different hardware layouts of these boards, slight modifications will occasionally be required between physical platforms.

Let it snow….

… and the snow was on.

If you go on the google search engine and then, in the search field. you type "let it snow", a strange event happens on your browser….

You will see some snow coming down,

How to make a stripboard Arduino clone, AKA the veroduino.

Once a project is past the prototype stage there is no need to use a complete Arduino, even with the ever decreasing cost of Arduino compatibles and the availability of cut down versions such as the Arduino Nano and Mini it’s still overkill for a lot of uses.  Fortunately it is very easy to build your own Arduino compatible circuit around the ATmega microcontroller and it will only cost you a few pounds; with some good deals on bulk components and by flashing the Arduino bootloader yourself you could do this for as little as a fiver.

Last week I needed to install twidge on a centos 5.7 server.

Truly, twidge is very simple to install into debian (or derived) linux distribution, but I found some problems while installing it into my centos server. 

First of all you shall download the twidge binaries from here:

https://github.com/jgoerzen/twidge/downloads

the twidge binary requires libcurl-gnutls

…

…

simply type the following command: