Posts
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Atmel's new USB XMEGA series
A package with Atmel’s atxmega32a4u finally arrived on Thursday. Although I’ve been waiting for the chip to become available for months, I’ve only gotten to etch a demo board for it on Friday night (what’s one to do on Friday night after all).
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Considerations for Short Distance UART Communication, Part 1
Whenever a system consists of multiple processors, the typical question that arises very early into the design process is that of their mutual communication. I’ve been programming chips to communicate for years now and went though quite a few communication protocols. Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on communication protocol design and I’d like to share my thoughts.
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ATxmega Complete Pinouts
The ATxmega devices from Atmel do not have a complete pinout drawn in their datasheets. So here it is, at least for A4 and D4 devices.
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Creole Wiki Markup
I’ve been using bitbucket for some time now to host my hgdeps Mercurial extension. I’ve never used any of the many features that bitbucket offers, including issue tracking and wiki hosting.
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Parameter Estimation by Model Checking for Biological Systems
During the last two semesters, I’ve been working as a member of the laboratory of systems biology on methods for estimation of parameters of biological systems. A paper is currently being written, which will hopefully appear on International Workshop on High Performance Computational Systems Biology (HiBi 2010). Though there still is work to be done, I’d like to summarize the results here in hopes that this text may also serve as a final report for the class “PA183 – Project in Systems Biology”.
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The Hardships of C++ GUI Development
This post was intended to be about the development of GUI applications with C++, but if you read forward, you’ll soon realize that it became more of rant, a monument to my frustration with existing C++ GUI toolkits (sometimes referred to as widget toolkits. Applying a bit of a self-censorship, I’ve managed to tune down the tone of the article a bit, though I had to remove a lot of “craps” from the text in the process.
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Compact System Monitor Applet for Gnome
I’ve written a super-simple panel applet for Gnome which displays current CPU load and memory consumption. The applet is supposed to be a space-conserving replacement of the default (and ugly) system monitor applet shipped with Ubuntu. Take a look at the picture of the new applet in action.
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The Remnants of an Old Friend
Few days ago a friend of mine, while tidying up our workroom, found remnants of a robot – Aya – which we built about 5 years ago for the Eurobot challenge. Ah, the memories. Back then we used Microchip’s PIC processors, specifically we were fond of PIC16F627A. It was very cheap and the aforementioned friend had had some experience with them.
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ZigBit ATZB-24-A2 Pinout
I’ve spent the last Friday afternoon trying to get my radio controlled airplane talking to my transmitter via a ZigBee link. I’ve deemed the traditional RF connection utterly useless as I’m getting rather severe glitches as close as 15 meters away (maybe I shouldn’t have tinkered with the receiver, who knows).
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ZigBit Bootloader
I was playing with Atmel’s ZigBit ATZB-24-A2 over the last few days and wrote a command-line utility that runs on both Windows and Linux and can be used to flash programs into these modules (assuming that they have the original bootloader installed). Atmel distributes their own bootloader client as part of the BitCloud SDK, but the command-line version didn’t work for me at all and the GUI version was very unreliable.
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Minix reloaded
We had a class reunion last week and I had a chance to talk to one of my former classmates, who is currently studying computer science in Prague. What’s interesting is that he somehow got involved with Minix project.
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Iterators Must Go
This is the catchphrase associated with the presentation given by Andrei Alexandrescu during boostcon 2009. I heard about that blasphemy a while ago, but I had neither the time, nor the interest to read it back then.
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The Site's New Layout
I’ve had a headache the whole day today. I couldn’t really concentrate on programming, so after I got home from school I’ve decided to kill some time before the dose of ibuprofen would kick in, and post an article here. Unfortunately, when I looked at the state the site was in, I’ve decided to fix it instead. I’ve spent the rest of the afternoon relaying and reconfiguring the site.
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Chaotic attractors
This Monday there was a deadline for submission of bachelor’s theses at my faculty. My girlfriend submitted a thesis on chaotic attractors. It concentrated more on their visual and aesthetic aspect rather than the scientific one, but I think it’s still worth reading through even for those, who can’t appreciate art.
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Extraction of Image Characteristics on GPU
While walking from school today, I ran into my bachelor’s thesis’ opponent (opponent is just the name of one of the members of thesis committee here in Czech Republic) and we chatted for a while. He told me that there is an interesting problem for me to tackle for my master’s thesis.
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The First Post
I’ve been noticing for a while that in a conversation, I sometimes tend to stop my thoughts mid-sentence, leaving the listener wondering about the points I’m trying to make. These interruptions of speech are caused by nothing but a lack of vocabulary—stopping to search for an appropriate word, but effectively ending the conversation instead.
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