Technical Writing

Nowadays, if you are working in scientific research, you must develop some skills in technical writing, to be able to disseminate your work and foster collaboration with other people. Unfortunately, this is something that usually the universities do not teach you during their degree studies! Usually, writing skills are incrementally developed based on collaboration with colleagues, natural attitude, expertise, feedback by reviewers, etc. However, there are good sources of information to allow faster development of those necessary skills to present in written form and defend our scientific developments. The following are some links to websites where it is possible to find some useful information:

6 Top Reference Sites to Write a Winning Research Paper
How to Write a Research Paper
How to Write a Paper

Enjoy!

Nerdkits begins

Tonight I remembered I bought a Nerdkit, containing an Atmel ATMEGA and several nice stuff (including USB programming cable, AVR compiler, and a lot of resources). Therefore, since I'm also quite tired, I decided to take it easy and start with the first tutorials. In around one hour, I built the breadboard Nerdkit platform, tested it, installed drivers and development software, developed a sample temperature A/D conversion with LCD output and ran it.

Everything went smooth, very nice electronic documentation, easy to follow tutorial content. Clearly, it sounds the same as Arduino - but once you already worked with Arduino it is nice to try something "more hardware" where you build actually everything from single components. Inspiring!

P.S.: To tell you the truth, I got inspired by an article I just read on Make magazine about some guys teaching hardware and software Arduino development starting from bare components, no soldering - just breadboard. Amazing!!!

Like videogames? Try kogregate.com!

It defines itself as the "YouTube of games", and Kogregate is really something like that: everyone can upload new games (mainly in Adobe Flash) and gain access to thousands of impressive games. Developers range from single hobbists to actual professional game developers, quality is really amazing. Give it a try, and you'll never have problems in finding a good game to play anymore!

Back to my hobbies

Hi! Finally I came back from a looong time of extremely busy schedule. I'm still working at the finalization of my previous ideas and will be back soon with updated.
For the time being, I suggest you to visit Hack a Day website: it is worthy to grab some good ideas and inspiration for further projects!

The power of Arduino

Some days ago I received the new Arduino VideoGame Shield. It comes with instructions on how to solder the parts, and to build it yourself is surely a pleasure. Today, I could test the tv output, and it works really great! With compatibility with Wii Nunchuk (up to two) and sound output (currently not working in my case, but I think it is a software issue), the shield represents an open platform for game development... I hope to get back soon with some of my homebrewed solutions and hopefully fun!
Tinker on!

Back to tinkering...

This message just to inform you that after an extremely busy period at work, I'm back to tinkering! Currently working at designing my own joystick for playing arcade games...

Arduino + NXT: it's alive!

Yesterday I finally tested my way to have Arduino control a LEGO Mindstorms Intellingent Brick. The possibilities are endless, once a proof-of-concept is made. And this is what I did exactly.
First, I developed a voltage reader for NXT using the instructions provided in the book "Extreme NXT". It is not hard, the tricky part is to build the cable, at the end - and some soldering. Then, I used the same principle to read the output from an Arduino digital port, so that it was interpreted by the NXT brick and used to drive some sound.
Currently, the system recognized "high" and "low" voltage as an input "virtual touch" sensor. I'll make experiments to understand how far it is possible to go, but the road is open... :-)
As soon as I'll package a good sketch + NXT code, I'll post it for your convenience.
Stay tuned!