I ordered some scuba gear during the sales last weekend. One of the items I purchased came with a free 1W LED flashlight (the yellow one on this pageYesterday at work-just for fun-I hooked the two lines going to the LED to my oscilloscope. Below are a couple of the screenshots I took of the signal ( Read more... )

Sometime, I plan to really check this out. It's so exciting!

LLVM 2.6 Release Notes

Behold Cambria:

( Read more... )

The Macintosh has had a fairly intuitive method for entering special characters from the keyboard that I'm surprised isn't available on Linux and Windows. (I first used it in Macintosh System 6.0.7 about 20 years ago.) If you know of a tool that works like this or is similarly intuitive for Windows or Linux, please let me know because I will ( Read more... )

I'm using Doxygen to generate HTML documentation from my C# code. It recognizes the .NET XML-comments.

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... )

Today, I signed a job offer from Sensus Conservation Systems.

And, in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, I will be an "Embedded Firmware Engineer" just like my blog title says I am!

My first day is August 12.

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... )

My résumé is typeset using LaTeX. It generates nice PDFs, but many online job applications require plain-text versions to be submitted.

Here is a sequence that converts my LaTeX file to plain text:
$ latex zdpurvis_resume.tex ( Read more... )

I just wrote these because everyone has been having eMail problems lately. Some have been rather upsetting and dramatic, and others have just been annoyances. Hopefully, these rules will help everyone. Feel free to add more or let me know where I am way off-base. I know I've violated some of these rules and I apologize.

The numbers below do not ( Read more... )