Category Archives: Programming

What I’ve been up to redux

Again I’ve been ignoring my personal projects for the chipKIT design challenge. Our entry (with a few guys from my hackerspace) is a KeeLoq shield, and Key Fob. Design Files / Firmware / Libraries are available here on github.

If you would like to vote for us, go here. Our Entry Number is ck765.

Here’s the video entry for the shield.

 

Cross platforming with MinGW/GCC

I’ve been working on this project that needs data streamed to the serial port, and I’m working on making it cross platform.  That’s at Windows/Linux … I’m sure if I get Linux working an OSX port would be easier.  I have to say MinGW is an great environment.  Teamed up with Eclipse, (other than my normal gripes with Eclipse) I’m pretty satisfied I must say.  I’m able to take my project over to Linux and compile just the same.

Now dealing with serial ports in Windows/Linux still needs some abstraction, I thought the MinGW lib’s would actually help more on this, but they seem to work fine for Linux but the process is slightly different in Windows, thus I still had to make wrapper functions for open/close/write/read and a few #if directives.  Not too bad, I just thought this is something simple enough that would have been built in already.  Oh also had to macro define sleep for a delay.  I should try to figure out how to compile for both environments with 1 compiler, maybe use crosstool.  For now I’m ok just having the same code and building on both environments.