Posted on February 20th, 2012  The *uino-1284p assembled Over the past few days I assembled one each of the *uino-1284p and *uino-32u4. Things went very well and few issues were encountered.
The *uino-32u4 went together flawless. For initial testing I used the Arduino Leonardo bootloader and core files. Since my pinout differs from the Arduino Leonardo this required some translating of digital pins to get the lights to blink. But blink they do. I am so glad to see this actually working. Loading the Leonardo bootloader onto the board using the Arduino 1.0 IDE was trivial and worked without a flaw.
The *uino-1284p went together with minor issues. On the hardware side I noticed that the polarity of the reverse polarity protection diode is marked wrong. To be exact, the schematic is correct, the schematic symbol is in the proper orientation. However, I did add a little “plus” sign to the circuit board to where the anode should be. I erroneously placed the little “plus” by the cathode. When it tried to place the reset tact switch on the board it would not fit. I don’t know if there is a “standard” tact switch, but i picked a different footprint for the switch on the *uino-1284p. I had to make something work by shoehorning a through hole switch into submission. It works and I will have to see what Digi-Key part is appropriate for this purpose.
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Posted on January 20th, 2012 The problem: I like MacVim with syntax highlighting for all major programming tasks. MacVim is pretty good at adding itself as an application to most filetypes I would use it for – until I installed Arduino and MPIDE. Since MPIDE is based on Arduino pre-1.0 it used the .pde file extension. Arduino 1.0 uses the .ino file extension.  While MacVim has no issues opening either file, it knows nothing about the file extensions. To open .ino and .pde files using MacVim I had to right-click (or CTRL-click), select “Open With”, then “Others…” and scroll down the long list of apps until finally arriving at MacVim. I did not want MacVim to be the default app for these files, just a quick and convenient way to open the files using the “Open With” menu, but without scrolling down the list. I made MacVim the default app, hoping it would populate the preferred list, then removed it. No such luck, but read on for the solution
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Posted on January 19th, 2012  The *uino-1284p v0.2 PCB Top
Today I received more *uino-1284p boards. The other day I already received *uino-1284p boards. Those boards were version 0.3 boards. The boards received today are the predecessor, version 0.2. I have been discussing my ATmega1284p ideas on the Arduino Forum. I had thought that what I accomplished with this board would be sufficient. But then a forum member pointed out that it would be really nice if the additional ATmega1284p I/O pins not mapped to Arduino compatible headers would also be available. While I had this version already committed to being made, I decided to revise the board. The revision went rather easy and I took that chance to order it as well. So now I have two different sets of these boards on hand.
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Posted on January 17th, 2012  The *uino-1284p v0.3 PCB Top Here it is! The *uino-1284p has arrived. It is an Arduino compatible platform based on the ATmega1284P-AU. The *uino-1284p board utilizes the ATmega1284P microcontroller. The primary goal of this project is to be able to access more memory, FLASH and RAM, while keeping the Arduino UNO compatible board size and I/O assignments.
The ATmega1284P provides 128k of FLASH and 16k of RAM. It has 10 more I/O pins then the ATmega328P. The additional I/O pins are brought out to a 5×2 header in a non-standard Arduino position. All other I/O headers are in the locations one would expect from an Arduino compatible form factor. The design features a dedicated ATmega8U2 for USB connectivity. The circuit has been taken from the Arduino UNO but the TQFP-32 package was chosen for easy solderability. Power supply input for the board is selected via a jumper. Power supply options are USB bus powered or unregulated DC input. An onboard LDO regulator will accept an unregulated input voltage between 6.4V and 15V.
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Posted on January 13th, 2012  The *uino-32u4 Circuit Board Order I have already written about the ATmega32U4 based *uino-32u4 I’ve created. Today I received the circuit board order. The order was placed with Seeed Studio’s Fusion PCB Service on December 24, 2011 and arrived at my door on January 13, 2012. I am impressed, at the speedy service and the quality of the boards. So far this has been an all round awesome exerperience!
Unfortunately I do not have any ATmega32U4-AU on hand. Soldering things to the board, getting it fired up and programming it will have to wait a little while longer. But I am excited and happy for this to have become a real physical thing, not just a figment of my imagination.
And just in case anyone wonders, I should have used a better camera to take these pictures. There are some significant distortions present caused by the camera. The boards are true and square.
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Posted on January 13th, 2012 When I first setup WordPress (many years ago) I immediately turned on permalinks. Having a pretty URL is important. But I did not give it much consideration at the the time and the /year%/%month%/%day%/%postname%/ format seemed quite reasonable. After a short time I realized that a hierarchy nested this deep is way overkill. But by that time Google had indexed the site and I didn’t want to mess that up. With all the renovations I have been doing the permalink configuration once again grabbed my attention. To make matters worse I also began reading about search engine optimization (SEO) and the significance of the URL.
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Posted on January 13th, 2012 I am using the Atahualpa theme for WordPress. It is just amazing how easy it is to customize anything. My latest adventure in WordPress has been the quest to add social networking buttons. I tried several WordPress plugins, such as Sociable, ShareThis, and AddThis, none of which I really liked. The feature I missed the most was being able to have more then one style in different areas of the site. Instead I signed up with AddThis direct and used their custom code directly in the theme.
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Posted on January 12th, 2012 I found myself in a predicament. I wanted to improve the way code is displayed here and went searching for something with line numbering and syntax highlighting. The SyntaxHighlighter Evolved plugin seemed perfect. I liked it but it really messed with my existing content wrapped in <code> tags. Trying to fix the issue I discovered that my stylesheet did not play nice with the plugin. In addition, all multiline <code> really should have been wrapped in <pre> instead.
I was faced with the daunting task of a search and replace mission. I wanted to replace all <code> tage with <pre> tags and all </code> tage with </pre> tags. Not all that fond of mundane slave labor I figured out how to run some sql command on the WordPress tables. I strongly recommend backing up ones database before manually manipulating the WordPress database. It doesn’t take much of a typo to really mess up the content. In fact, I tried all of it on test installation just to be sure all will work well.
Here are the two statements that did the trick for me, it did the search and replace quite swiftly.
update wp_posts set post_content = replace (post_content,'<code>','<pre>');
update wp_posts set post_content = replace (post_content,'</code>','</pre>');
Posted on January 9th, 2012 While relocating the PeeWeeLinux web site I found myself needing to make bulk changes to a some 1800 static HTML pages. I had to insert a new HTML tag before the “head” tag on each page.
The search and replace workhorse in this method is “sed”, the Unix stream editor.
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Posted on January 7th, 2012 
For some reason I had an ATmega168 and an ATmega328 sitting in my parts bins. To put them to use a couple bare PCB were ordered from a Chinese vendor on eBay. The boards I received were in superb condition. Most surface mount components were 0805 size, except for the FDTI chip of course.
The first component placed was the FTDI chip. It was soldered using the drag and wick method using my old rosin core solder. Since placing these I have received some new tips for my trusty Weller WTCP. I also acquired some no clean flux and solder. I am hoping to eliminate the wick when soldering SMD. The remainder of the SMD components were easily placed using the magnifier I received for Christmas. I can place 0805 components without magnifier but having the light and magnifications is much less strain on the eyes. The magnifier lamp also helps to place components accurately and nicely lined up. I choose to power the board strictly via USB. Therefore none of the regulator parts or power switching parts were populated. Just a small wire to permanently connect VUSB to VCC was needed to always power via USB.
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