Maker Faire Rome 2014

Maker Faires have been around for a while now in the US but they're new to Europe, last weekend I decided to pop down to the second year of Maker Faire Rome. It was super - the scale was amazing (I wonder what the NY one must be like) and the level of enthusiasm from all the...

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Imp powered In-System Programmer

Introduction The Atmel AVR MCUs are very popular in the hobbyist electronics market, in particular the ATmega328 found in the Arduino UNO. The MCU on an UNO and similar boards is generally programmed via a bootloader, a piece of code that needs to be preinstalled and makes the...

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Smart Config for consumer products? Alternatives?

Smart Config looks like magic the first time you see it - what it's doing seems impossible if you know a bit about encrypted wifi networks. Back in October 2013, out of a sense of intellectual curiosity, I spent an unreasonable amount of time looking at decompiled Java and wireshark...

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avrdude.conf-as-JSON REST service using Heroku

Subtitle: Why do in a day what you can spend two weeks automating? Credit to Terrence Parr from whose motto this is derived. This post discusses creating a REST service to provide all or specific parts of the Avrdude configuration file as JSON. Atmel produce a wide...

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Ideas for improving Smart Config

This blog posting is me thinking out loud about how to improve the flawed Smart Config process. However by the end I essentially come to the conclusion that there's not much that can be done. So unless you're interested in seeing what ideas I had and why they don't...

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