OK, so it’s not the smallest computer ever, but at only 3mm long it is the smallest computer I’ve ever programmed. This is the PIC10F206 and yes, that’s the tip of my finger it is sitting on. This little beastie has less than 1k of memory and only runs about as fast as an [...]

I have been building audio amplifiers for one of my clients for a while now but we’ve been having some overheating issues so I decided to go high-tech, ditch the old-school linear amp and use a class-D amp. A class-D amp works a little differently from a traditional analogue amp in that it generates a [...]

I just wanted to post this little bit of code. I needed to produce a list of phrases from a database but only show phrases with more than four words. Here’s the SQL: select phrasetext from phrases where array_upper(regexp_split_to_array(phrasetext,E’\\s+’),1) > 4; How this works is a regular expression is used to split the string by [...]

The last month or so I have been learning how to write apps for iPhone because I have a business opportunity for an iPhone app (which I can’t tell you about yet – stay tuned). But this article is not about the app, it is about my first impressions of programming for iPhone after 20+ [...]

Today I am working on some old code and am being frustrated by the CDHtmlDialog class in MFC7. All I want to do is display some hyperlinks and a BMP image embedded in the EXE as a resource – is that so very hard? Well it can be done but it’s not well documented. Here [...]

Here’s a really simple way to make a styled button using only CSS. I wrote this because a lot of the “Pure CSS Button” scripts I found on the interwebs use a PNG image for the button which is not pure enough for me dammit! This one does not use any image at all which [...]

I’ve just got to have a little boast about my latest PCB. I managed to draw up the schematic and lay out the PCB in just 3 hours start to finish. And anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m quite thorough when designing boards, double-checking measurements and footprints and so on. Admittedly, I [...]

What a mouthful of acronyms in that title! This is going to be a very nerdy post. Today I have been having fun processing audio with the NXP1758 Arm Cortex-M3 microprocessor. It’s really quite easy with the DSP library from NXP. Above is a screen shot of it showing the spectrum of a single note [...]

A few people in my circle of acquaintances have been recommending OurPCB for prototype printed circuit boards so I thought I’d give them a try with my latest board. This board is a work-for-hire job so I’m sorry I can’t tell you what it’s for but I can tell you it’s a 4-layer board. With [...]

This is the final part of a 4-part series. See also part 1, part 2 and part 3. I’m really running out of time now. I need to get this thing into a box and looking nice ASAP. At this stage I’m not 100% sure it will fit. I chose the box on the basis [...]