Practice Curiosity | Exercise Your Mind

Calculating Epoch for PIC32

It’s kind of ironic that I had to deal with time, right after the new year. I needed to be able to calculate the number of seconds since 1/1/1970 (epoch or unix time) without using all of the standard time functions that come with C32. This code takes into account leap years. C UINT32 GetTimeSeconds() { rtccTime t; rtccDate d; UINT32 ulRetVal; int i; UINT8 month, day, year, hour, min,...

Basics of BREW Development

Not very many people know that much about BREW (at least in my experience). It’s a relatively old framework developed by Qualcomm to allow developers to create applications on mobile devices that use their chipsets. It’s similar to Apple’s iOS SDK and Google’s Android SDK in that it gives you low level access to hardware, GPS information, etc. Although it’s capable of presenting graphics, it isn’t as...

Java Socket Server

A socket server is the basis of communication for most networked applications. I figured that this is something so basic that it’s important enough to share. The principles are pretty simple at this layer: Listen on a specified port Spawn a thread to service that connection Output data received to a log file (you can implement server responses in this phase) Listen on the same port for additional connections I created two classes,...

AWD Robot

I’ve been working off-and-on on an all-wheel drive robot that interfaces with my android phone/mac/windows machine via an adhoc wifi network created on the robot itself. I created a custom handshake to go between the robot and whatever device is connected to it, allowing the ability for the software to set the speed and direction of each individual motor, independently. So far, the code for the microcontroller and windows machine is...

Desire for Domination

Life’s desire (or even need) for domination is one of the things that makes “life” so fascinating. It almost seems as if life is unhappy with its own existence and, naturally, wants to obliterate itself. Why else would every single organism on this planet (or perhaps the universe) compete to be the last one standing? Notice that I didn’t distinguish between a person, persons or even humanity itself. All life...

"Everybody is a genius. But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." - Albert Einstein