This is an article I stumbled across today.  I'm a fan of using stdint.h, and I like this explanation of why and when to use the different types.

Embedded.com - Guidelines for writing efficient C/C++ code

I was looking into writing something like this in December. Come January/February and someone else has already done it! I'm gonna try this out soon.

Bonjour/Zeroconf for Arduino

I think this is a neat C-preprocessor trick for implementing binary literals. Unlike 0b0101 which some compilers support and others support via a patch (gcc), this method is portable:

Barr Code: Binary Literals in C

Here's the interesting part:

// Internal Macros ( Read more... )

My introductory article on understanding counters/timers has been "published:" Back to the basics: Doing Hardware Counter/Timer design using High School Science

In the RSS feed, the editor summarizes it:Using the same unit-conversion techniques and dimensional analysis techniques learned in high school, Zane Purvis takes non-engineers and ( Read more... )

When I was little, I wondered why when I got more than 9 lives, or too many coins in a Nintendo game, the number went from 9 to A to B... In Super Mario Bros. (SMB1), you'd start getting crowns and other weird "characters."

In Super Mario Bros. 2 (SMB2), the screen showed that I had J coins. Neat! Previously, I had thought it was just ( Read more... )

For those curious, here's what the protothread function in my previous post looks like after being passed through the C preprocessor and being indented using indent -linux:

char lights_thread(struct pt *pt)
{
{
char PT_YIELD_FLAG = 1;
switch ((pt)->lc) {
case 0:;
for (;;) {
printf("\n-> red") ( Read more... )

Here's an example C program showing implementation of the same simple algorithm using protothreads and a finite state machine. The protothread implementation is much easier to read and was easier to write after I figured out the protothread calls. Note that my FSM is longer than a lot of C FSM implementations you may see because I added an " ( Read more... )

As I was working on some routines & C preprocessor macros for dealing with fixed point numbers , I had the need to convert from one format to another. So, this is what I came up with initially:

b = fixed_10_6_to_10_22(a);

But, it's so long, and typing all those underscores is tedious. So, I think I'll use this instead:

b = f10621022(a);It's ( Read more... )

Why do people still write "C/C++"? C programmers and C++ programmers don't even go to the same parties, anymore.

Ask a C++ programmer to write a program in C. He can't do it.
Ask a C programmer to read a program written in C++. He can't do it.

I believe that anyone who knows both will agree with me.

Good run this evening. Not my best time for all around the lake, but the run was good. 41:23 ( Read more... )