Tutorials

For my final year project I ended up experimenting with ATxmega16e5 microcontroller, after major step backs with TI ARM microprocessors (don't get me wrong ARM is very powerful). 
At the first glance these new xmega series uC are quite impressive. 32MHz internal clock, incredibly fast ADC (16e5 can have up to 300ksps), 12 bit adc, DAC, two or more USARTs and list goes on. Moreover you are able to use tools you're familiar with, when it comes to program AVR family micros, providing you have programmed AVR family before. I have yet to test full capabilites of the new xmega series, but I'll write posts about individual modules, like ADC, USART, DAC etc.

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This is more like a quick reference for myself, how to pass a method as a function argument. It turned out to be very useful for one of programming tasks. I had a lot of  "get" type methods with the same return value, and needed to construct a table of results. And passing method as argument, was a very neat solution.

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Out of boredom I figured out I'll write a library from scratch to interface the character LCD display which I got from ebay, quite cheap. Less than 7 pounds. However, I have written before a simple code to interface an LCD from scratch for 8051. So I have some experience and understanding how the character LCD works. The difference now will be, I' ll be using 4 bits, instead of 8 bits to communicate and read the busy flag. Essentially improving the previous code. I chose to write it for Arduino this time, because I have Sanguinololu bought for my 3D printer, and at some point I want to write a LCD user interface for it, from scratch. There won't be anything spectacular about this tutorial, there are already good articles about this stuff for all kinds of devices. Moreover, arduino has bunch of LCD libraries available for download for free. BUT... in this tutorial I'll describe problems I encountered and try to be as descriptive I can be so you can understand how the character LCD works, making you able to interface it with any micro-controller available, and even driving it by hand.

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At the begining I thought I'll need to send text only through email. But the more I thought about it, I understood that I want to add three files to the mail as well. By altering previous code I managed to add simple Multipart MIME message support. In other words file attachments.

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For one of my projects I wanted to develop a crash reporting dialog where user can enter the steps he did to crash the application and then by pressing send button the app automatically will send me user report and the log to my e-mail address. Unfortunatelly Qt doesn't have a Smtp library, and I don't want anything heavy just to send a simple string of characters through gmail smtp server.

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