Entries for 'Dan Freve'

Sometimes, it's difficult to articulate exactly what type of work DMC does day to day.  For example, in a career fair setting a DMC employee might only have a few minutes to describe our projects to a candidate.  It quickly became apparent to us that a physical demo that highlights our capabilities would be very beneficial in these situations. Enter, the automated ping pong game!  ... [Read the rest of this blog...]

A few days ago, I was working on a project where I needed to control a stepper motor using the .NET Micro Framework on the GHI Embedded Master microprocessor.  Stepper motors are a unique type of motor - the velocity is controlled by a pulse wave input.  The faster the pulse frequency, the faster the motor rotates. It turns out that most stepper motors will tend to vibrate enough t... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Recently, a colleague here at DMC was looking for a quick method of converting a drive-based path to its corresponding universal path name.  Basically, he is writing a tool in LabVIEW that will run on computers that may have the same network drive mapped to different drive letters. After a quick search, I found that Windows has a networking function that does exactly what I'm looking for!
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It is well-known that increasing the number of pins on an integrated circuit (IC) increases its cost.  To reduce the number of pins, several serial protocols have been developed to transfer data between IC's.   One such protocol, I2C, uses only 2 bidirectional open-drain wires. For a recent application, I needed to write a quick class to communicate to a Newhaven LCD display over t... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Recently I've had the opportunity to do some embedded development using the .NET Micro Framework platform.  The .NET Micro Framework is a light-weight version of the full .NET framework that can be ported to run on a variety of processors, including the ARM and Blackfin architectures. Using the .NET Framework, developers can implement their solutions in C#.  While develop... [Read the rest of this blog...]