Hyperterminal Replacement For Linux

This is a little gem I found recently when I needed to communicate with my OpenLog board. A lot of tutorials want you to pull up HyperTerminal in Windows to talk to OpenLog over the USB->UART bridge. My biggest problem with this is that I’m primarily a Linux user, where HyperTerminal is unavailable. That’s all well and good, however, I’ll just boot into my Windows 7 install and do it, right? Wrong. Windows 7 no longer ships with HyperTerminal. I jumped back to my Ubuntu Linux install and started hunting for a HyperTerminal replacement. The best solution I ended up finding was a command-line application called minicom. This handy little app is a bit to get the hang of, but once you’re using it, it works like a charm. Here’s a quick rundown of connecting to a serial device over USB using Minicom. Read the rest of this entry »

8-bits of Processing Goodness

The last semester of my undergrad program in CSE is finally here! This semester I have a Senior Design course where students form their own groups and come up with an idea related to the curriculum and implement it. Now if only I had an idea of what to design…

I’ve been participating in autocross events for years and have always wished I could afford a data acquisition system like those you see used in Formula 1, Indy, Le Mans, and/or NASCAR. With a DAQ, I’d be able to see exactly what my car is doing at an event and use that information to help me drive the course faster on my next run. Hopefully.

That got me thinking. Surely I’m not the only amateur autocrosser wishing for an affordable data acquisition system made for the weekend warrior. In fact, LOTS of people across the nation, and across the globe would probably love such a system. I didn’t know of any that existed on a college student budget, so I figured why not make one? It just so happens this senior design semester is the perfect time to get started. But where to begin? Read the rest of this entry »

Free Day For All!

SparkFun Electronics held their Free Day event on January 7th, 2010 at 11am EST. I had a few parts that I wanted to order for my senior design project this semester (more coming on that in another post) and was really excited to be able to get those parts for free during the event!

Or maybe not. I hopped into the #Sparkfun chatroom on irc.freenode.net the morning of Free Day to check out what people were chatting about. To my dismay, hours before the event started, there were already almost 700 people in the chatroom. According to Sparkfun’s limitations on the event, only 1,000 $100 orders would be awarded. The numbers were already daunting. I pulled up the Sparkfun website to find their recently updated web servers were already buckling under the load of people preparing their shopping carts. Uh oh. As time neared 11am, the chatroom hit the 1,400 user mark and my hopes of free electronics started to dwindle. Read the rest of this entry »