OpenTechLab

If you’ve been reading my blog for any amount of time, you’ve probably observed that I’m a big fan of all things open source, especially on the hardware side of things. One area where OSHW seems to be lagging a bit is in the test & measurement department, so it was a very pleasant surprise for me to stumble upon a fairly new channel on YouTube about a month ago.

As you can see from the first video, the presenter (sorry, I couldn’t find the name of the bloke who makes these videos) gives an overview of the cheap logic analyzers on the market that can be loaded with open source firmware and then gives a very detailed demonstration on how to use the devices with the nifty open source Sigrok T&M suite (especially the PulseView GUI tool) and how to use a Linux environment and scripting to take measurements.

If you have any interest in this space, this is definitely a channel to which you should subscribe. There is also a show notes site that has links and other resources for the videos.

Using C++ in Arduino

In another case of me stumbling upon something which takes me down a rabbit hole, last week I was watching coding videos on YouTube when this one was recommended in the comments of another:

It’s quite a long video, but if you have any interest in coding and are an old fart who grew up with 8-bit personal computers (or are at least a fan of retrocomputing), then the time will pass quickly on this one. It sounds crazy, but the presenter (Jason Turner) of this talk was able to make a game for the Commodore 64 in modern C++! The way he did it was to create a tool to convert from the 80386 flavor of x86 assembler to 6502 assembler (well really 6510 in this case), which apparently is more feasible than you may think. His development environment is an online tool called Compiler Explorer, which for some reason I only learned about with this video. It automagically spits out assembler from C++ compiled from a variety of different compilers. In this case, the Turner created a custom local version of this tool to do the 6502 conversion.

I was gobsmacked at multiple times in this video. Many of the newest C++ features (from the C++17 standard) were used. With some careful coding, Turner was able to produce code with literally no overhead from all of the C++ features. The compiler was able to optimize many lines of C++ down to a handful of assembler op codes. Just watch it, you’ll be amazed as well.

This video, in conjunction with the series of posts that Hackaday has been running about using C++11 in Arduino, has convinced me that it would worth it to investigate the use of C++ in the Arduino coding environment. Arduino library coders already have to use a base level of C++ when they write for the ecosystem, but most people who write sketches do it in vanilla C-style (well, the bastardized Arduino version of it anyway). After seeing that talk, I had a lot of preconceptions of C++ overhead blown away. The ability to use the modern features of C++11 sound tempting indeed, so I plan to do some investigations into the feasibility of incorporating more C++ patterns into Arduino sketches, and I’ll be posting my findings here. Stay tuned.

KiCad PCB Rendering Tool

I have a habit of skimming my RSS reader (yes, I’m one of those old fogies who still uses one) in the morning while drinking my coffee, opening tabs of interesting things to examine in further detail later, while simply reviewing the rest of the new posts. Sometimes that means it takes me a bit to get back around to something intriguing among my many browser tabs.

Such is the case with this article from Hackaday. It’s just a short blurb about a new open source Python tool for making 2D renderings of KiCad boards. The attached demonstration image certainly looked nice. When I finally got around to downloading the code from GitHub and trying it out on one of my designs, I was pleasantly surprised. The script made a very sharp SVG rendering of my board, but unfortunately, there are only a handful of components in the PcbDraw-Lib library, which meant that most of my stuff didn’t get rendered.

Since I’ve been looking for a way to make nice illustrations of my PCBs for documentation and promotional purposes, I decided that I’d invest some time in adding components to the library, since I think the project has a lot of promise. After about half a day of muddling through making component drawings in Inkscape by studying datasheet engineering drawings, I was able to output a complete render of my Empyrean board, which you can see above. I’m quite happy with the result.

I’ve got a pull request in for the components that I’ve created so far, and as I continue to use the tool and fill out more of the library, I will continue to submit them upstream. While it’s still pretty rough around the edges, this project gets a strong recommend from me.