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Hardware
UART to RS232 voltage level shifter
An illustrated (many photos) step by step build of a voltage level shifter/converter/translator.
Software
Reverse engineering serial ports
Most of the embedded systems are equipped of a serial port for ease the development process. When they are delivered around the world the serial ports are hidden to not be used by final consumers. This article describes how to discover physically headers of the port (Vcc, Tx, Rx and the Ground), how to connect the UART adapter and finally how to get the console of the device by discovering the baud rate it uses.
Memory barriers for TSO architectures
In the first part the article presents what are memory barriers and in the second part it explains what are the news TSO (total store order) barriers.
A DS1307 library for AVR Atmega
Davide Gironi released a library for the low-power real time clock DS1307. If your microcontroller is an AVR Atmega and you search a RTC for you project Gironi library comes with read/write of year, month, day, hour, minute and second. A good way to reduce your time to market.
2013 LLVM Developers' Meeting
The seventh general meeting of LLVM Developers and Users was November the 6th and November the 7th. The talks slides and videos are now available. If you are a lover of compilers this page will be a pure pleasure for you.
Courses
FREE video-based electronics class
63 videos on electronics. Each of the video deals with one specific subject. A few randomly selected “
How to decode the color bands on a resistor
“, “
An introduction to the NPN transistor
” or “
How to build the relay that turns on and off automatically
“
Embedded Systems - Shape The World
In the
embedded systems weekly issue #2
I shared a course of the University of Texas at Austin. This week they release online the first ebook needed to follow this course. Click it to get another high quality content.
Misc
Open SmartWatch Project
Sony goes one step further. Few times ago they provided a SDK to let developers build their own apps and now they give the ability to create and flash our own firmware. To guide us on the road of custom firmware they publish lot of documentation like this one that describes the
watch hardware
.
Researchers find new, ultra-low-level method of hacking CPUs – and there’s no way to detect it
The future of hacking? A very interesting article that let you know that it is possible to modify CPU transistors by “doping” them!