Posted: March 26th, 2010 | Author: Bret Kuhns | Filed under: Technology | Tags: electronics, linux, OpenLog, Ubuntu | 1 Comment »
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 »
Posted: March 24th, 2010 | Author: Bret Kuhns | Filed under: Programming, Technology | Tags: arduino, linux, OpenLog, sparkfun, Ubuntu | 2 Comments »
I recently hit a bug in the Sparkfun OpenLog v1.1 firmware that left the device useless. I found out the hard way that version 1.1 only supports up to 255 log files. Once it hits this limit the firmware doesn’t know what to do with itself and loops endlessly. This even prevents you from entering command mode where you could otherwise reset the log number. Nate Seidle at SparkFun quickly released an update, v1.2, to correct this problem I was having. But now I had to figure out how to flash the firmware on my OpenLog. It turns out the process is extremely easy in Ubuntu, but the GitHub documentation targets mostly Windows, so I decided to document the process for Ubuntu users from start to finish here. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: February 23rd, 2009 | Author: Bret Kuhns | Filed under: Technology | Tags: linux, Ubuntu | No Comments »
I updated my laptop from Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) to 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) about a month or two ago. I noticed that I haven’t really seen too many updates come through in a while. I finally took a look at my software sources list and noticed everything was still configured for Hardy. I changed everything to Intrepid, and the update floodgates opened!
I wonder why my repository list never updated during the dist-upgrade…
