i2c is a protocol to communicate with microchips. It is widely used if the required data rate is not that high (up to few thousand bytes per second or similar). Reading data from some client (which could be some sort of sensor, or an Analog-Digital-Converter for example) with the Raspberry Pi is usually as easy as just reading from a device file (/dev/i2c-0 for example), specifying the device address beforehand, […]
In my recent electronics projects, I encountered two cases where a chip supporting the SPI protocol behaved in a weird or inconsistent way when communicating with the computer controlling it. I had an ADS 8320 Analog-Digital-converter (which should measure some voltage 100k times per second in 16bit resolution), which reported data like this when given a monotoneously rising, then falling voltage: Weird data received from an AD converter via SPI […]
I’m planning to build another radio telescope (I’ll write more about that once it’s a bit more advanved), and for that, I need to solder a lot of SMD stuff — mostly because many of the parts I need are only available in SMD. This has a few advantages — especially it’s cheaper and smaller — but it can also be very difficult to do with a soldering iron, for […]
I’m happy to announce the immediate availability of the second beta version of kdev-python, the python language plugin for KDevelop! You can download the sources from kde.org; those can be compiled against KDevelop 4.4 (which is the current stable version). Changes over the first beta release include: Two crash bugs fixed Fix a bug in parse priority things (it did sometimes cause documents not to be reparsed after a dependency […]
In an effort to improve the overall quality of KDevelop’s user interface, Aleix and I polished the settings dialog of KDevelop. Since the Kate guys challenged us by showcasing their “awesome” gimp skills, I feel like I have to do that too: Comparison between the old and the new configuration dialog in KDevelop There wasn’t really any changes to functionality, it’s just supposed to look better and be more understandable. […]
This is the third day of the KDevelop / kate sprint in Vienna, and it’s really fun and productive so far! There’s several new things related to kdev-python which I’d like to write something about. Beta release First of all, there’s a first official beta release of the python plugin, which is to be used with the (new) 4.4 (resp. 1.4) stable versions of kdevelop / kdevplatform! You can download […]
I’ve done some observations and experiments with an 1.2m parabolic dish radio telescope which I built from cheap components, at a frequency of about 10GHz (3cm wavelength). Among other things, radiation from the sun and the moon was successfully detected. Since I’m not too eager to typeset equations and graphs in HTML, here’s a nice PDF describing the project. Have fun reading, and feel free to leave comments 🙂
I recently rewrote most of kdev-python’s code completion code, as it was a huge mess (it relied largely on regular expression matching, which just isn’t powerful enough to do this properly). The result is less buggy, easier to maintain, and has unit tests (yay!). In the process, I also implemented quite a few features which I want to post a few screenshots of. There’s a second issue I want to […]
There’s now support for (graphically) debugging python applications from within KDevelop, like it works with C++. The implementation relies on communicating with the default python debugger, pdb, which is shipped with python. It aims to nicely map all of pdb’s features to buttons and tooltips / toolviews. kdev-python debugger in action Features Key features include: Step through code using the well-known “next”, “continue”, etc. buttons; KDevelop will automatically open up […]
There’s now a 1.3 branch in kdev-python which is compatible with kdevelop 1.3 beta (the 1.2.82 or so tags). If you want to use kdev-python, please use this branch. The current master branch uses some functionality which has not been added to kdevplatform yet, and thus won’t compile unless you apply a patch. I’m sorry for breaking it, I’ll try not to do that any more in the future. Update: […]