Guest Speaker Jim Jackson, HTML5 for .NET Developers

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Please join us on Wed, Jan 30 for a special guest speaker.  Jim Jackson, co-author of the book HTML5 for .NET Developers.

There is limited space available, so you must register on meetup.com for this event.

Jim Jackson is the co-author of HTML5 for .NET Developers, available now at http://www.manning.com/jackson and on Amazon. Jim has worked on rich HTML5 web applications for clients like Vogue, Rolling Stone and Playboy and is currently building an HTML5 game for the Windows App Store.

Getting started with CPLD’s and FPGA’s

Chris has been dabbling with CPLD’s and FPGA’s.  He wanted to share some helpful resources with anyone else looking to get started with them as well.

Netduino Début with Color Sensor

Netduino
Netduino
Netduino

Over the last few weeks Harford Hackerspace has had the pleasure of beta testing the Netduino. The Netduino is a development board with a form factor similar to the Arduino. Care was taken when designing the Netduino to ensure compatibility with most of the existing Arduino shields. That’s about where the similarities of the two devices ends.

The Netduino uses Microsoft’s Open Source .net Micro Framework SDK along with Visual Studio C# (or VS C# Express) as the primary development environment. C# application developers will be able to quickly adapt to the .net Micro Framework and start programming microcontrollers in a matter of minutes. However, this does not let them off the hook for learning the basics of electronics.
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LED Fireflies in a Jar (v1.0)

Me and my wife recently had our first child.  I’ve been trying to come up with some projects I can do for the kid.  Well, around this time of the year the fireflies go crazy around my house, so we came up with the idea to do led fireflies in a jar.  It should be something cool for him to stare at and is easy to build.

Schematics, C source code and hex file are available here on our wiki.  If you want to build one it should only take about an hour.

I’m planning on making a version 2 with some changes, stay tuned for that one.

Using the PICkit 2 : As a Programmer

PicKit2 Debug Express
PicKit2 Debug Express

Around the space, we have been using the PICkit 2 Debug Express quite a bit lately.  This has allowed us to get pretty cozy with the functions of this handy little programmer and I thought I would share some of these features with you.

I’m sure you’ve read the previous tutorial ‘Programming PIC Microcontrollers in C‘, if you haven’t, you should go familiarize yourself with it now.  Continuing on from there, after we have a successful build of a led blinking we can use the PICkit 2 to program our chip via the ICSP header.

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