bookmark_borderA Better Serial Monitor

Today I would like to talk about a very interesting piece of software that I have been using in the past few weeks, called Serial Port Monitor (version 7.0) by Eltima Software.

This software is perfect for when you are developing an application that has a massive amount of information going through the Serial Port. I am currently using it to analyze diagnostic data from one project. Is is great that you can easily save messages for a later use in its own .spm file format.


serial port monitor


serial port monitor

On the image bellow, you can check the windows that I am currently using: “Terminal View”, showing exactly what is coming from the Serial Port. “Dump View” that shows timestamp, the hex data and the message, and the “Table View”, showing the captured data from the developer’s point of view: it presents the table consisting of the recorded IRPs. Each row represents one IRP and each column represents one single part of IRP. It is interesting to point that the Serial Port Monitor doesn’t block the serial port while in use, meaning that another software can be “blocking” the port and you can still analyze all the data.


serial port monitor

In case you wanna know more about it, check the Wiki!

This is a great piece of software, and I am really impressed by the quality of the products from Eltima. I will probably do some more review in the future!

If you are an embedded systems engineer, you should check it out!!!

bookmark_borderProtoStack Atmega32A Dev Board

During the past few days I have been playing with ProtoStack’s Atmega32A Dev Board and have been very happy with it. Along with the Atmega(8/16/328) dev kit, so far it’s one of my favorite boards.

It comes with everything you need in order to have it going , the big IC-ATMEGA32A-PU µC, 10-pin connector (you can also use a 6-pin ICSP header), capacitors, resistors, voltage regulator for an external power supply and more… You can check the complete list and manual here.

If you are looking for an Atmega32A Dev Board, I would recommend this one for sure!

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bookmark_borderATmega8A Development Kit Review

Few days ago I received a ATmega8A Development Kit from ProtoStack.

The board is well made, and it has everything you need to start developing any kind of project using the famous Atmega8, which is the same µC used by the first Arduino. Actually, you can also use this board with different µC’s such as Atmega168 and Atmega328 (used in Arduino UNO).

The kit have a lot of space to add more components, and a good thing is that the VCC and GND voltage is easily accessed everywhere of the board. On the pictures and the video I posted here, I have connected the output pin PB2 to an resistor, green LED and to the ground, even without soldering the board works great.

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bookmark_borderReview: Lacie Pocket 500gb External Drive

Some days ago I bough the Lacie Pocket 500gb external hard-drive, and since then I have been very happy with my purchase. The HD is small enough to fit any pocket in my bag (3.19 x 0.71 x 5.08 inches [WxHxD]) and with the weight of 3 pounds, it makes easy to take everywhere. I know that having an external notebook hard-drive isn’t the safest way to store you precious data, but its a great place to store music, videos and photos in which you can take anywhere. At home I have my HTPC (Home theater PC) with a lot of free storage, so what I do is, I have a backup of all my data on the external lacie drive, and another copy of my precious things on my HTPC, this way I hope all my information is safe (I am also thinking on having another copy on the clouds [amazon s3]). Everything is backed up using a simple bash script made by me that will make copies to the external drive and to my media center via FTP.

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bookmark_borderHowTo: Backing Up All Your Photos From Flickr

flickr0.jpgAre you like me, who uploads almost every photo you take to your Flickr Account? Right now, I’ve uploaded 6,472 photos. What if the hard drive where all your precious pictures are stop working? What would you do, start downloading your pictures from Flickr one by one, no way right?

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