Doodads and Whatnot

For a long time I’ve been frustrated by the lack of tools for programming micro-controllers (PICs specifically) using MacOS X. Most bit banging serial programmers wont work with a USB-to-Serial adapter, though I’m told some commercial ones do. There are some USB programmers available but until recently I wasn’t able to find one that was compatible with the 16F88 (PDF, datasheet) and had MacOS drivers available.

Enter the PICkit 2

After finally getting tired of SSHing into a Linux box in another room every-time I wanted to write to a PIC I started looking for a USB based programmer with support for the 16F88. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the firmware for Microchip’s PICkit2 had been updated to work with the 16F88 (as of version 1.20). The PICkit is a nicely made unit (about 10cm x 4cm x 1cm) that can be bought, with a low pin count demo board included, directly from Microchip for under AU$100.

This still left me with the problem of Mac drivers but it didn’t take long to find Jeff Post’s PK2, an open source program for working with the PICkit2.

Using PK2 with MacOS X

Version 2.00 of PK2 works well well with MacOS. Older versions may work too but I haven’t done much testing with them. The program is easy to build and there is a native HID report which means that there is no need for MacOS users to muck about with libusb. Very nice indeed. When building make sure you use the osxhid Makefile target (unless you really want to use libusb). Once built and installed PK2 can be used to update the programmer’s firmware. Everything should be good to go and the programmer should be able to see the PIC it is connected to like so:

tobie@Tea-Chest ~ $ pk2 -device

PK2 version 2.00 - 2006/07/02
 pk2 -device
Communication established. PICkit2 firmware version is 1.21.0

Device ID 0x0760
PIC16F88 Rev 5 found
  Family:         Midrange
  Program size:   0x1000 (4096) words, width 0x3fff
  Eeprom size:    0x100 (256) bytes
  ID location:    0x0
  ID size:        0x4 (4) bytes
  Device ID       0x0760
  Write burst     4
  Program command O
  Program mode    n
  Program timing  n
  Data timing     d
  Erase mode      0
  CP mask         0x0834
  Bandgap mask    0x0000 0x0000
  Config mask     0x3fff 0x0003
  Save osccal     0
  Save bandgap    0
  Command table   63 00 02 03 04 05 06 08 18 17 1f 1f ff ff ff ff

Handy resources

The PICkit 2 comes with a CD-ROM which contains lots of examples and code for the supplied PIC16F690 including several lessons which should help someone not familiar with PIC programming to get a good grasp on the basics. For other PICs there are many forums and mailing lists on the internet including Microchip’s own. A quick Google search should point you in the right direction.

For updates and discussion of PK2 there is the pickit-devel Google group.

To be fair to the MacOS team that works on Skype they’ve got a lot of things spot on. Skype for MacOS X is a Cocoa app and it feels good, it works well with other programs and on the whole it fits in. There are a couple of things about it which annoy the socks off me though and out of them there are two that really stick out in my mind.

One of the problems could probably be blamed on the Mac developers working for Skype but the other is probably beyond their control.

Whinge #1 – The splash screen

UPDATE: Turns out there is an option in Skype’s preferences for this but there is no way to set it using the GUI. You can set the option using the standard defaults tool by running “defaults write com.skype.skype SKShowSplash NO” or, if you are living dangerously, open ~/Library/Prefences/com.skype.skype.plist in the property list editor and change SKShowSplash there.

Splash screens are something you rarely see on a Mac and they’re specifically listed as being a bad idea by Apple’s user interface guidelines. Despite this Skype throws one over the top of whatever you might be working on and, to make matters worse, doesn’t provide a way to get rid of it again. Even if you focus on another window it will remain hidden until the splash screen finally goes away.

It’s not as though the splash screen achieves anything, you already know the program is loading from the way its icon bounces gently in the Dock (just like any program that’s starting up).

The splash screen also makes the option to have Skype start when you log in useless since it throws up its always-on-top-let-me-just-hover-in-front-of-what-you’re-doing splash screen right when you most want to start working on something.

Sadly, it looks like we’re out of luck as far as disabling it goes, at least for the time being. Windows users can start Skype with the /nosplash option and it will remain politely silent until it has something useful to tell the user. I tried editing the splash screen’s NIB file to move it or at least make it smaller but it seems that Skype checks the integrity of its files before launching. Very annoying.

Whinge #2 – Video support

The Mac client still doesn’t support video calls despite the length of time it’s been available in the Windows client. I don’t think this is really something that the developers can be blamed for though. It seems likely that who ever is in charge of deciding what the developers work on just doesn’t see platforms other than Windows as being very important.

I can live without video support but it’d be nice to have it as an option and there are times when it would be very handy. If it were feasible I’d just use iChat for video calls but that’d more or less throw cross platform use out the window, and if iChat was a decent cross platform option I wouldn’t bother with Skype at all.

My mobile phone took a trip to the ground a couple of weeks ago so I’ve been looking at potential replacements. There are a few things I really keen on my next phone having:

• Bluetooth
• 3G network support
• iSync Support (including Address Book photos)
• A decent web browser, preferably Nokia’s WebCore based browser.
• Good support for 3rd party applications.

Seems fairly simple, given a well defined list of “must have” features, to find a suitable phone right? Well it turns out that searching for certain mobile phone features is more than a little difficult.

The search

Deciding where to start looking was easy enough. The desired features limit choices to the higher end Nokia phones. I headed over to Nokia’s Australian site to see what they had that fit the bill. The site has a handy flash based tool to help you filter the available models based on the features you want.

The problem is that it doesn’t allow for choosing between different types of the same feature. For example, you can filter out models that don’t have a “Web Browser” but there is no way to choose between phones with modern browser with features like what you’d find on a desktop and page mangling browsers that only support WAP or some kind of HTML light. There is also no option of filtering based on things like support for third party applications, etc. Poking around the site a bit more turns up some slightly more useful pages such as the Business phone comparison but they still lack the details a nerd really wants.

What do you really want

Since Nokia’s site is so useless are far as detailed searching goes I went to the Series 60 browser website to see which phones are listed as supporting it. The list isn’t long, in fact at the time of writing it only lists 8 phones most of which don’t interest me as they have features that annoy me such as qwerty keyboards or bizarre form factors. The common element between these phones is that they use the 3rd edition of the Series 60 operating system. This narrows down what I’m looking for but the problem is the same as before: there is no site that offers searching for a phone based on the operating system, much less a specific edition.

So I’m left with going through the product pages individually to find out the details I need. Not difficult but annoying.

What about other brands

The Motorola SLVR L7 and RAZR v3i both looked promising at first but it seems that support for Motorola’s phones in iSync is very poor and if you want to use Bluetooth for syncing it is completely absent in some cases. This probably isn’t Motorola’s fault but it stops me from wanting any of their phones. The really odd thing about this poor support is that Apple chose Motorola as a partner for iTunes on mobiles.

What does this all mean?

None of this is a big deal but it reenforces something: geeks really are a niche market. The details I’m looking for aren’t hidden but they aren’t made easy to find either.

It also seems that people are still buying phones based upon “checkbox” style features, e.g. they want a phone with a “web browser” but they don’t really care what type. This doesn’t matter of course but it’s annoying if you do care and have no way of separating them. Then again lots of people are probably still choosing a phone by walking into a sore and taking whatever looks good and comes with a plan they want.

These really need to be thrown out.

It was fun and horrendously ugly while it lasted but I can’t remember why keeping them in a bag sounded like a good idea. Perhaps it’s time to test the flammability of the wax that was rubbed into them.

My plan to stop myself losing hair by trapping it inside dreads is now officially a failure.

One of the few things that was missing from Dreamhost when I signed up has now been added: Subversion repository hosting!

The new subversion section in the Goodies area of the Dreamhost control panel asks for a project name, ID and domain/directory along with a list of user-names and passwords. There is also the option of limiting repository viewing to just the provided user-names and passwords.

I haven’t experimented much yet but it appears to work well. All I need now is the ability to use WebDAV with an entire domain (not just a subdirectory).