Rapid prototyping can be an accelerator for hardware or embedded solutions. But for a successful outcome, follow the recommended checklist / task sequence given below, as all of these steps will likely need to be touched upon at some point in the process.
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For under £10, you can put together a microcontroller development platform, ready to program directly from your PC over USB using free Arduino software. Once programmed, your microcontroller will run autonomously, untethered from your PC, powered by as small a battery power supply as a single 1.5V AAA or 3V CR2032 coin cell. You can have it interact with its environment using dozens of low-cost sensors and motors. Everything you need to explore the exciting world of embedded systems is available to you, typically for less than a day pass on the London underground.  A homebrew Arduino Nano microcontroller development kit for under £12 (including optional OLED display) If you haven’t done so already, you may want to start by reading the Preface to the Computing Series: Software as a Force Multiplier, Sections 1-3. “Everything” you need for ultra-fast desktop search1. Everything(tm) is an ultra-fast desktop search utility that can scan through hundreds of thousands of files in milliseconds using a pre-built and real-time updated index.“Everything” brings order to information growing at scale (documents, photographs, source code, spreadsheets, etc.), and tames the problem of proliferating folder trees.  Everything is a fast desktop search utility that can index 1 million files in less than 1 minute, and generate search queries in milliseconds. We’ve all been in the scenario of searching through electronic documents for a document you know you prepared three, maybe four weeks prior… maybe it was longer… and now you can’t remember where you saved it… or in what format: was it a quickly written text file, a word document, a few paragraphs within One Note, on a desktop post-it note, or did you email yourself from your phone?… After trying different Windows searches in various recently used folders and looking through Word, Excel, and PDF files, and trying to remember possible filenames to search for, at some point you prepare mentally for the moment when you will give up the search and attempt to redo the missing work, salvaging as much of it as you can remember. The general problem of wasted effort locating information we know we have, occurs more often than we’d like to admit. With “Everything“, it can be better. If you haven’t done so already, you may want to start by reading the Preface to the Computing Series: Software as a Force Multiplier, Sections 1-3. 1. Notepad++: a programmable, extensible, feature-rich text editorNotePad++ (NPP) is an open-source programmer’s text editor with outstanding built-in features that can be further enhanced with powerful plugins and extensively customized with your own configurations. NPPs features include syntax highlighting for a large collection of programming languages, code folding, recordable macros, cloned views, selectable shortcuts, tabbed documents, and a host of other capabilities. This article describes a few of the dozens of capabilities. It also shares a pre-configured Notepad++ package that I use (20.0MB compressed, 50.0MB uncompressed, download here), which contains the configurations and capabilities I use. The file is portable and self-contained: just unpack NPP to your drive (in a separate folder to your current running instance) and run notepad++.exe from there.1  Notepad++, by Don Ho, multi-view with syntax highlghting Continue reading this article…
If you haven’t done so already, you may want to start by reading the Preface to the Computing Series: Software as a Force Multiplier, Sections 1-3. 1. Total Commander: a programmable, extensible, feature-rich two-panel orthodox file managerTotal Commander (TC) is more than just a two-panel orthodox file manager for Windows. It is a swiss army knife of computing utilities and is the first piece of software that I install on any Windows computer on which I’m working.1 Total Commander, used well, is a force multiplier.
I’ve been using TC continuously since 2001. Over the years, I’ve put together a Total Commander Expansion Pack (lite and full) for the TC platform that conforms to the tenets and further extends TC platform’s capabilities with tools I have found valuable. Both are pre-configured downloads to allow unpack and start using with minimum fuss (I use them when switching computers). Feel free to download and give them a try. Feedback or questions welcomed in the comments.  Total Commander Expansion Pack Winter 2024 – Toolbar View with Integrated Applications, Download from link. Continue reading this article…
*New!* (29 Aug 2020) – Turtle Logo v1.8 (portable) is available! Developer kit with source code included. Suitable from ages 3 years to adult. (970 lines of Forth code).
A challenge facing parents and teachers is how to help children develop ‘builder’ relationships with technology rather than being limited to the passive consumption of content created by others. The consensus on what’s important for older kids and adults is clear: coding. This enables children to participate in the creation of their own technological “micro-worlds” — environments rich in educational potential.[14] This autumn, spurred by having our own young children (one aged 4 years, the other 16 months), we began an experiment, the result of which is a Turtle Logo program for Windows computers (freely downloadable) that is simple enough to be accessible for children from 3 years and older, while providing an extensible platform that can grow with the child. The long-term goal is to enable children to express their creativity, artistry, and natural ‘builder’ impulses using coding, computer graphics, and robotics as readily as the previous generation could using paints, brushes, and building blocks.  Turtle Logo – Inspiring the next generation of technology builders.
Your computer, kitted out with best in class software tools (mostly open source), can be perhaps the single greatest force multiplier that you have as a scientist, engineer, or mathematician. With the willingness to work hard and persist, and some skill at ‘software joinery’, you can accomplish more than you realize solely through your own capabilities. This article is about achieving those visions which you can do single-handedly, and how this enables having and testing the kind of bigger visions for which you need that next level of force multiplication that comes through larger budgets, high-performance teams, and management. (Technology Infrastructure Series) In case you’re taking seriously guarantees about uptime, reliability, or backups advertised by website hosting companies, you should know that most guarantees of service are an idealized concept, especially if you use a low-cost web hosting service. Now, this doesn’t mean you should avoid low-cost web hosts. What you should do is give a little thought to the “what if’s” that may arise, and what you can do before they arise to minimize the pain when they do. In this article, I’ll go through a few situations you might want to consider, and some options you can use to reduce your risk.
Introducing the LaTeX typsetting platform If symbols, formulas, and equations comprise a large portion of your professional communication, then you will gain significantly by becoming proficient with the LaTeX (pronounced “lay-tech”) document preparation platform. With the right tools and a little practice, the relative ease of creating beautiful mathematical documents with LaTeX will likely mean that you leave Office in favor of LaTeX for your technical writing. This article introduces the LaTeX platform (short for Lamport-TeX, after the mathematician Leslie Lamport), illustrates its capabilities, and highlights the key differences between using LaTeX or WYSIWYG “what you see is what you get” word processing systems such as Office. For those that like to know the human side of the tools they use, we provide a brief history of the legendary TeX (pronounced “tech”) platform, which underpins all variations of which LaTeX is one, looks at the philosophy motivating the development of TeX, and something about its legendary creator Donald Knuth.  Don Knuth, Leslie Lamport, and an illustration of of why writing mathematics in LaTeX is easier than in Word.
If you write frequently, it is likely that you have certain stock or administrative material that is included in each of your documents. You also likely spend a substantial portion of your overall effort re-writing, editing, or re-arranging material. In this situation, one of the best ways of preserving your time and your sanity is to adopt a modular approach to document development. In this final article of the three part series on LaTeX / TeX, I will discuss a modular approach to document preparation using TeX. I’ll also provide modular templates that should make your use of TeX more efficient. |
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© 2009-2024 Assad Ebrahim To contact me on email, use: assadebrahim2000 at gmail dot com (do the obvious) |
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