Data + Acute
The Free On-Line Dictionary Of Computing includes this comment about data (it appears in the entry for information:
“People or computers can find patterns in data to perceive information, and information can be used to enhance knowledge. Since knowledge is prerequisite to wisdom, we always want more data and information. But, as modern societies verge on information overload, we especially need better ways to find patterns.” © Denis Howe (@denishowe)
To be acute is to be marked by keen discernment or intellectual perception, especially of subtle distinctions. “Cute”, the abbreviated version of the word, has come to mean both shrewd and attractively small.
The portmanteau word Datacute has been chosen to represent my specialty: producing efficient tools and systems to assist with incisive data analysis.
Latest Posts
What’s wrong with my High-voltage Serial Programmer?
There’s a common High-voltage Serial Programmer circuit online for resetting fuses on the ATtiny85 (and similar). They use a 12V power supply, which I don’t have. I decided to experiment using a cheap DC/DC converter.
SSD1306 FR Output
While working on my version of a software library to control the SSD1306 OLED driver chip, I read about the FR output pin:
This pin outputs RAM write synchronization signal. Proper timing between MCU data writing and frame display timing can be achieved to prevent tearing effect.
This sounds perfect for my double buffering library. Unfortunately, the output pin is not connected to anything, even though there is an available connector on the ribbon cable, right next to it!
Tiny OLED Board
I’ve been working on a software library named Tiny4kOLED for the ATTiny85 chip to control a 128x32 pixel OLED using the SSD1306 chip. (The 4k in the name is because that is how many pixels there are in total.)
The software for the library is available on GitHub.
On the hardware side, I designed a small prototype board that I thought I’d share.
Developing Snow Fighters
I’ve had a lot of fun in the last few weeks developing code as part of the ACM Queue 2011 ICPC Challenge also known as the Icy Projectile Challenge. There are a lot of ideas that I never had time to investigate, but I thought I’d blog about the ideas I did investigate.
Eclipse Helios Mostly Works
For development at work, I downloaded and started using Eclipse Helios packaged for J2EE development, wanting to see what I could stumble upon as new or different, and whether I could recommend it to the rest of my team yet without having to describe a whole lot of changes to our practices.