Arduino USB HID Keyboard

June 24, 2012 - 3 mins read

Turn your Arduino UNO into a USB HID keyboard, and make buttons that do whatever you want. Make it a useful tool, with new buttons for Cut/Copy/Paste or Volume+/Volume-/Mute, or annoy your friends and colleagues by setting the keyboard to perform random keypress after random delays! The USB HID keyboard conforms to the standard USB specification, so is functional on all modern operating systems. All this is made possible by the use of the Arduino Device Firmware Update (DFU) function.

Cross-Compiling for TI MSP430 Launchpad

June 23, 2012 - 17 mins read

Inspired by this tutorial. We assumes you are running Ubuntu 12.04 and have a TI msp430g2231 but may work for other msp430 devices (see the Other MSP430 Boards section). This tutorial will cover obtaining the dependencies needed to cross-compile a simple light blinking code for your msp430 device, how to flash the cross-compiled binary to your device, and finish with some advice on how-to compile for other msp430 device variations.

Arduino on Raspberry Pi

June 15, 2012 - 2 mins read

Connecting an Arduino to a Raspberry Pi is simple. In a terminal, install the Arduino IDE: sudo apt-get install arduino This will take a while to download and install all of the dependencies. Once completed, you can start the IDE from the terminal: arduino Or, from the LXDE menu, Electronics->Arduino IDE. Note: This is IDE version 0018, and does not seem to recognize boards newer then the Duemilanove. Update: The IDE version in the package manager has been updated to version 1.

Raspberry Pi NES Emulator

June 14, 2012 - 1 min read

This tutorial will demonstrate how to install Nintendo NES/Famicom emulator on the Raspberry Pi running Debian. Begin by installing the necessary dependencies. In a terminal, enter: sudo apt-get install scons libsdl1.2-dev libsdl1.2debian-esd subversion libgtk2.0-dev Checkout the most recent sources using subversion: <del>svn checkout https://fceultra.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/fceultra/fceu fceultra</del> The repo has moved here: svn checkout svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/fceultra/code/fceu fceultra Change directory into the root of the source tree cd fceultra/ Compile and install FCEU using the scons build tool:

Raspberry Pi + OpenCV

June 14, 2012 - 3 mins read

OpenCV is a suite of powerful computer vision tools. Here is a quick overview of how I installed OpenCV on my Raspberry Pi with debian6-19-04-2012. The guide is based on the official OpenCV Installation Guide on Debian and Ubuntu. Before you begin, make sure you have expanded your SD card to allow for the install of OpenCV. Its a big package with lots of dependencies. You can follow my instructions here.