Marc's Public Blog

What's special about this place is that all the karts are electric.

So, what I thought about the place:

All in all it was different but still fun :)

Jennifer is still lacking a bit of the aggressive spirit necessary to push people around who are blocking you, and making a spot where there isn't one, but her fastest clean lap wasn't that much slower than mine. She did well :)

Note, you will need the LiquidCrystal_SR_LCD3 driver from the NewLiquidCrytal Library.

You will also need the Aiko Library: https://github.com/geekscape/aiko_arduino .

Pebble v2 requires at least the IDE 0.23 (untested) but 1.0 or better is recommended. The code is of course arduino 1.0 compatible.

At the LCA 2012 Arduino Miniconf, we got to build a new toy, a Freetronics Pebble v2 (schematics here). This was a refresh of the Pebble V1 (schematics here) which was the target of the very first arduino miniconf I missed in 2010.

This new Pebble had even more hardware to program against and was a much more compact design due to the use of a bunch of SMT parts (actually there are 2 arduinos on the board, one is dedicated to usb/serial communications, removing the need for an ftdi chip).

Like good hacking projects and conferences, the design and software were improved until the last minute, and Andy worked all night before the conf to get us his demo code (along with bits from Luke and others).
Andy wrote the very cool aiko event handler for arduino. You give it a list of callback functions and it'll do its best to call them on the interval you gave it (interval in milliseconds). For arduino folks, with Aiko, code looks like this:

void setup(void) {
  Serial.begin(DEFAULT_BAUD_RATE);
  // Call LCD init early so that others can write to it.
  lcdInitialize();

  Events.addHandler(clockHandler, 1000);
  Events.addHandler(lightHandler, 1000); // Aim for 250 ms
  Events.addHandler(rotaryEncoderHandler, 100);
  Events.addHandler(serialHandler, 30); // Sufficient for 38,400 baud
  Events.addHandler(temperatureHandler, 1000); // Aim for 250 ms
  Events.addHandler(touchPanelHandler, 250); // Aim for 50 ms
  Events.addHandler(rgbLedFadeHandler, 10); // Can run slower.
  // Call LCD last so that it can display variables that just changed.
  Events.addHandler(lcdHandler, 1000); // Aim for 100 ms
}

void loop(void) {
  Events.loop();
}

So Andy got us working code to test our hardware, but of course it wasn't fully optimized (hell, code never is). So, that gave me a chance to do some arduino programming to see what could be improved. It was a good learning experience.

After a bunch of work, here is what I was able to do:

Here is the end result:

Again, the code: https://github.com/marcmerlin/aiko_pebble_v2

Here's a quick man page :)

pop up menu with selection cursor

backlight menu

LED color change delay menu

Note that I as read on http://www.circuitsathome.com/mcu/rotary-encoder-interrupt-service-routine-for-avr-micros and have seen with multiple decoding errors in my rotary encoder test code (shown below), it is probably a good idea to add a couple of small caps around the encoder's feet:

And that's it folks, that was fun :)

Oh, actually I also made a repository of small demo code I wrote for the Pebble v2: https://github.com/marcmerlin/pebble_v2_demos .

All the code is arduino 1.0 compatible

After coming back from the Arduino Miniconf at Linux.conf.au, I ended up with a freshly soldered freetronics pebble v2.

Like the Pebble V1 (schematics here), it uses MC14094 8 bit shift register to drive the LCD using only 3 wires instead of 6 or more.

The Pebble designers thankfully used the same shift register wiring than shown on the LCD3wire page on arduino playground. However, the code that came with it only had limited functionality for talking to the LCD, and the code on the LCD3wires page is also limited in functionality (on top of being incompatible with arduino 1.0).

So, I ended up finding Francisco Malpartida's cool work on virtualizing the stock arduino LiquidCrystal library (very featureful and optimized timings). In turn, Ragnar used that codebase to design his own shift register library for 2 or 3 wires.

Ragnar's wiring and code is somewhat complex because it exploits some interesting hacks:

In other words, if you have a non latching shift register, use his code and wiring. If you have a latching shift register, you should use the code from this page and the more widespread LCD3Wires wiring.

So, where does this bring us?
I used Malpartida and Ragnar's work to make an LCD3Wire hardware driver for the NewLiquidCrystal Library. This brings full library support to the pebbles as well as other folks who use the reference wiring from LCD3wires.

I called the new library NewLiquidCrystal in the hopes that it will become the new de facto library in standard arduino one day. My code is here: https://github.com/marcmerlin/NewLiquidCrystal and includes the new LiquidCrystal_SR_LCD3 driver I wrote. To be clear, all the code came from Francisco Malpartida's work, I built on top of it to write my LiquidCrystal_SR_LCD3.cpp driver for LCD3Wires compatible hardware.

I also wrote an extended LiquidCrystal Demo which should work on all liquidcrystal supported devices (baring the character count).

Here is a demo of my popup menu code that works with a rotary button (cursor showing what is currently selected if you click on it)

I'm now working with Francisco to get my code included in his tree, and if we're lucky that code may eventually get included in the standard arduino libraries as a faster and more flexible LiquidCrystal replacement.

As a first time ever, I was lucky enough to get a 1st class seat for a flight to Australia (actually I'd have been happy enough with business, but that was not available). I still don't think it's worth the 'list price', but considering the quite reduced price I was able to get it for, it almost felt ok :)

I setup a little office I could work in :)

So what is there to say about Ballarat. It's a former mining town. The town itself can be visited in an hour or so (count a day to see the nearby attractions). All in all, definitely not something you'd fly from abroad to go visit, but since Linux.conf.au, my favourite conference, was there, so so was I :)

Downtown had a few old buildings that were kind of nice:

Ballarat's birds were loud but pretty :)

They had an old observatory with vintage telescopes, we went there one evening to do a bit of stargazing

After the conference, I went to visit what seemed fun to visit. Bird World was a grandma and grandpa 'shop'. it could have been a lot of fun, but unfortunately their free flight cage net was broken, so they had to put all their great parrots in cages. It was a bit sad since I could tell some were very friendly and would have loved to interact with me.

this one was so friendly and definitely wanted to come say hi

Next, I went to Sovereign Hill. This is actually the highlight of this town, a recreation of what used to be this old gold mining town. They have shops and blacksmiths like 150 years ago, and people dressed in the style of the day. Kids can pan for gold in the river.

Someone also showed how they make gold bars:

They had authentic machinery using steam power:

They then had a night show that was a recreation of the mini insurrection that happened there against the British taxation. Too bad they got squelched by the British and never fought back after that.

After a ncie visit to Sovereign Hill, I went to see the local Ballarat Wildlife Park. What can I say, I'm a sucker for Autralian wildlife parks (which I much prefer to zoos). It's always fun to be able to pet a few unusual animals like a wombat, and hand feed kangaroos or wallabies.
While I didn't expect too much, at the same time I've actually been pleasantly surprised by such parks in the smaller towns, and that turned out to be true there too. Their crocodile feeding was particularly impressive, their kangaroos quite friendly, and petting wombats was cool :)

this was a very cool layed back kangaroo, nice claws too ;)

food, for me? :)

kangaroo was friends with wombat :)

food comma :)

those things peck hard when you feed them, they don't know any better :)

The crocodile feeding was quite impressive:

this guy really had balls, even by Australian standards :)

I hope he gets paid enough for this :)

While it was a small town, the places to visit still made for a fun day.

Dinner with friends

The first day, we had the Arduino 2012 miniconf where we built the new Pebble v2:

Jon Oxner, making sure one of the Pebble V2 was built correctly

This gave me something to play with during the conference. I spent most of my free time hacking on my new Pebblev2 board after the fact and ended up writing a new lcd3wire library and a much improved Pebble v2 Aiko Demo Code.

At the end of the conf, I went to the Hackerfest, where I got to write the rest of my code for my Pebble v2 :)

Andy Gelme and I, riding in style, to the hackerfest :)

Yeah, it works (mostly!) :)

John brought some samples from freetronix for us to play with, drool over, or buy and bring home :)

But back to LCA 2012. They had some great keynotes (they were covered on http://lwn.net/). The keynotes are on youtube.

The talks themselves, there were very some good ones. You cand find all the videos on the LCA 2012 youtube channel:

Two of the speakers sent one of their probes to near-space with a helium baloon after their talk:

And to finish a few random pictures of dinners and evenings:

That T-shirt is so full of win :)

Mikal came at the end of the conference to tell us about next year, and he's going to be the poor sob who's going to run it next year. Beat of luck Mikal :)

And just like that, the conf was over:

As always, LCA was a very well run conference, and despite the choice of a location that was very inconvenient (the uni itself being too far from whatever already limited city center was available in Ballarat), I had a great time again. In the end, it's still about the people, the conference, and the speakers.

Back in SFO:

The next morning, we stayed at the same bed and breakfast we have been staying at these last years:

I swear, this picture looks just like the same than last years :)

for old times' sakes I went to catch one of her farm chicken

I went for a quick visit and took a few pictures:

After that I spent the rest of the time in the 'old' office:

main cafetaria is still small, but very nice

people hard at work :)

hard at work, still :)

on friday we did gallette des rois