RAREblog

Shrimping factory One great strength of the Open Source community is our willingness to share information. Whether it's a new technique, a new program or a new supplier, we're happy to tell others what we've discovered. Shrimping with Tayda Cefn Hoyle's Shrimping It! website offers excellent value for people who want to build the Shrimp low-cost Arduino clone. I got the supplies for the Spa Shrimping session from my usual UK suppliers, but it would have been cheaper to get them from Cefn. The Shrimping It! site also tells you about Tayda Electronics . That's the company from whom the Makers of Morecambe buy supplies. I decided to try Tayda and placed a small order a few days ago. Fast delivery The Tayda website is clean, fast-loading and easy to navigate. 28 pin ZIF Their prices are very competitive, but I was worried that my order would take a long while to arrive. Tayda are based in Bangkok and Colorado, and I live in the UK. I need not...

I'm planning on running some more Shrimping workshops later this year. We had a useful five minute retrospective after the Session at SPA, but I have a few extra questions I'd like to ask. If you attended the session and can give me five minutes of your time, the survey is here .

SPA feedback Yesterday's evening session at BCS SPA went wonderfully well. The chart below shows feedback from the participants, with a scale that runs from Cr*p on the left hand side to Excellent on the right. One participant clearly felt let down, and I wish I knew what upset him. The the majority rated the session as excellent, and a couple wanted to give it 11/10 :) The participants were fantastic - lively, responsive and friendly. Just about everyone got their Arduino clones working; the one unresolved problem was almost certainly due to a hardware issue. I'm still glowing from one comment, which I found in my inbox this morning: ' I had so much fun this evening - it was like being a little child again!'. We used my new eBook  as the construction guide. If BT lets me access the Internet all day, (not a certainty, I fear)  I will make a few urgent corrections to the eBook later. If you've already bought a copy you will be notified by email when the...

Homebrew ZIF ISP This morning I finished off the homebrew In System Programmer (ISP) that I started yesterday. It's now happily burning bootloaders onto the chips I'll be handing out on Monday's SPA session . I'm relieved to find that the installed code includes a blink sketch. That means that the Shrimp-builders will see that their new creations are working as soon as they power them on. I need to prepare 20 chips for the session, plus a couple of spares just in case. At this rate I'll be done by teatime.

I'm working on the preparations for my Monday evening Shrimping session at BCS SPA 2014 , and as always things are taking a little longer than planned. Phenoptix AVR ISP I got an AVR ISP shield from Phenoptix a while back and verified that it would program the chips I need for Monday. It has standard IC sockets, which means that you need to be a bit careful when removing the chips after you've burned the bootloader. If you don't do a straight pull you can bend the legs of the chip and the damage can make the chip unusable. I decided a few days ago that I'd use a Zero Insertion Force (ZIF) socket for the programming. These allow you to drop a chip in, close the gripper of the ZIF, program the chip and then release it. You can then remove the chip easily without any risk of damage. ZIF Socket It's a ZIF socket, Jim, but not as we know it I got a couple of sockets which were surprisingly hard to find in the UK. When they arrived I discovered that they ...

Today I tweeted for advice about the best way to put a bootloader and a blink sketch on the chips I'll be using for the BCS SPA conference next week. (There's still time to book !) Shrimping It! One respondent asked how people could learn to program if the chips already had a blink sketch on them. That's a good question which deserves a full answer, hence this post. But first, some background. I'm semi-retired but over the years I've taught courses about aspects of IT to a lot of adults. I've learned a couple of things that have worked well for me and my students: I make sure everyone starts and finishes with a win , and  I introduce one new idea at a time This approach starts students off by giving them something that's easy to copy and is more or less guaranteed to work.  Then I guide students as they experiment with changes and enhancements until they have mastered all the skills they need. So for the Shrimping lab, students will d...

The Shrimp Farm As you may know I am running a diversion on Shrimping It! at BCS SPA next week . People attending the diversion will be given the kits, and will get to keep the Shrimp they build. I'm writing build instructions in an e-book on LeanPub . I'll be publishing it Real Soon Now(tm), before it's finished, with an initial minimum price of £0. That means that you can get the e-book free and will get all subsequent updates without paying anything more. If you do, please provide feedback and let me know of any mistakes. SPA Shrimp Kit Once the book has been debugged I'll raise the minimum price to 99p, but early customers will still get updates free of charge. The book is detailed enough that I hope you can build your own Shrimp following the instructions. If you want to build a SPA-style Shrimp on you own, you can get just about everything you need from ShrimpingIt ! To my surprise and delight, buying from them will cost less than I paid for ...

I've been working hard on the notes for the Shrimping It workshop I'll be running as a diversion at BCS SPA next week. A Shrimp The diversion is running on Monday 30th at 19:15.  That's slightly later than the time I originally posted. The notes should be useful to anyone who wants a detailed guide to building a Shrimp, and I've decided to open source them under a CC Share-Alike Non-Commercial License. The notes are currently a work in progress, but I'll be editing and completing them on-line over the next few days. I will publish them as an eBook on LeanPub with a minimum price of £0.00. This means that you can 'buy' the book for free and get future updates as they become available. The eBook is not quite ready for publishing yet, but there's a sample available up on GitHub . When you click on the link you'll be offered a chance to view the whole file; that will download a copy of the pdf for you to view at your leisure. I'll remo...