Crispy Bytes

Irregular byte sized observations from a Software Engineer

Month: March 2023

  • Engraving a PCB

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    joel.a.crisp

    Hardware works best when it matters the least. Norman Ralph Augustine It’s time to move our IR Transmitter circuit from breadboard to PCB. Just as a reminder, this is what the circuit looks like: This is a circuit trivial enough to be made on a single layer Through Hole board (TH). These boards are readily…

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  • Debugging with an Analog Discovery 2

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    joel.a.crisp

    The wages of sin is debugging. Ron Jeffries I have demonstrated that it is possible to use an ESP32 both as an infrared transmitter and receiver, and I mentioned that the IR receiver I used decoded the carrier wave. In today’s post I shall show you how I discovered that fact using a Digilent Analog…

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  • Let’s talk about GPIO (Part 5)

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    joel.a.crisp

    “spooky actions at a distance” Albert Einstein Last time we talked about the LED PWM controller in the ESP32, today we’ll talk about the Remote Control Transceiver (RMT) device which is similar but capable of input as well as output. In order to utilize this controller we need some external hardware, in this case the…

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  • Drift Reporting with Terraform

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    joel.a.crisp

    “Why do I keep on drifting? Yes, I wish I knew why? I am not aware of the reason myself. Why do I keep on drifting?” Avijeet Das In a previous blog post I talked about Gap analysis, the process of determining which asserts you own are under Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) management. Once you have identified…

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  • Gap analysis with Terraform

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    joel.a.crisp

     We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. Donald Rumsfeld It may seem obvious, but often overlooked, that in order to manage something – a cloud asset like a…

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  • Let’s talk about GPIO (Part 4)

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    joel.a.crisp

    The world belongs to those who think and act with it, who keep a finger on its pulse. William Ralph Inge Now that we can use basic digital GPIO functionality, let us look at using one of the SoC functions which can be connected to the GPIO via the IOMUX. In this case, we’re going…

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  • Good blog post on Software Engineering

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    joel.a.crisp

    “The only way to go fast, is to go well.” Robert C. Martin, Clean Architecture I read a post here which has a number of good observations and some good suggestions around software engineering best practices. Although it is specifically about rust, a lot of the suggestions and comments are more widely applicable. I would particularly…

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  • Let’s talk about GPIO (Part 3)

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    joel.a.crisp

    We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them. Steve Jobs Last time we build a small demo app to blink a light on a Sparkfun ESP32 Thing+. Today, we’re going to extend that to use a button click to toggle the light instead. In order to do that,…

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  • Let’s talk about GPIO (part 2)

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    joel.a.crisp

    “The Doctor: Don’t blink. Don’t even blink. Blink and you’re dead. Don’t turn your back. Don’t look away. And don’t blink.” Steven Moffat One of the most basic uses of a GPIO pin is to connect to an LED, the ubiquitous Light Emitting Diode. This is so common that many boards actually come with an…

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  • Let’s talk about GPIO (part 1)

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    joel.a.crisp

    Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”  Charles Babbage General Purpose Input Output (GPIO) is the primary way by which microcontrollers sense and change their environment.…

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