Even more updates Posted at: Tue, Jun 29th, 2010 | 6:16PM UTC By Josh Ashby

A few items of update. First off, TI has launched a new product, the MSP430 Launchpad.

The Launchpad is a $4.30 with free shipping dev board for TI’s MSP430 chip family. On the board there is USB which supplies power, and acts as the debugging emulator and the programmer for the chip, and then a nice 20 pin DIP socket for the MSP430 chips. The board breaks out all of the pins for the chip, and also has a spot for an external crystal. After a very frustrating, and long cursing at TI’s servers spurt, which lasted a good day as the Launchpad was so popular I finally got around to placing my order, however the backorder for the Board looks like I will have it around the end of July, start of August sadly. Hopefully I can find, and build a dev environment for the MSP430 on linux, seeing as there is a GCC port for it already all that is left is integrating it with Code::Blocks, and finding a way to upload the code to the MSP430.

Other goodies that I have received include Read more…

Updates Posted at: Sun, Apr 25th, 2010 | 10:18AM UTC By Josh Ashby

Linux And Sci is once again due for it’s regular yearly updates, and this time it brings a new theme! Read more…

AVC ’10 Posted at: Sat, Apr 17th, 2010 | 6:48AM UTC By Josh Ashby

The Sparkfun Autonomous Vehicle Competition is TODAY! Read more…

New IRC channel Posted at: Tue, Apr 13th, 2010 | 6:42PM UTC By Josh Ashby

Linux And Sci is proud to announce: the Linux And Sci IRC channel! Read more…

Drill press Posted at: Sun, Mar 7th, 2010 | 9:42PM UTC By Josh Ashby

Having completed etching my Quad Low-side motor controller board, I needed to drill out the holes, the only problem: I don’t have a drill press, and the nearest readily available one is at my grandparents house two towns away.

Read more…

GUI madness Posted at: Sun, Dec 27th, 2009 | 11:46AM UTC By Josh Ashby

First off Linux And Sci would like to wish everyone a happy holiday season.

After having messed around with Open Frameworks for about 2 weeks now, I’ve come to a) like it, and b) want to remake BOBs control GUI with it. Because BOB has a modular build system, and can relay as much information to the computer as needed, making a GUI for him doesn’t always work out as being the easiest part of the project. PyQt tends to not want to play nice with Pygames joystick command from what I’ve messed around with it, and I would like to do the GUI in C or C++ with the under laying levels being Python and Perl as needed. This is because Python provides a nice, and in my personal opinion, easy to use serial module: Pyserial. Coding the main GUI in C means I refresh my past C days, and with the addition of Open Frameworks, things such as threads are easy to use, and the joystick can be handled by OpenGL which also can take care of graphics. Read more…

Code Editors Posted at: Sun, Nov 22nd, 2009 | 7:23PM UTC By Josh Ashby

Quick update:
I’ve decided to start up development on my PyTe code editor. So far I’ve managed to get a new version made with PyQt4. This version includes tabbed editing, and a basic tabbed web browser.
As a result, I’d like to know what everyone liked in a code editor, feel free to let me know in the comments!
PyTe’s Code

Program, sleep, program, repeat Posted at: Sun, Nov 8th, 2009 | 9:31PM UTC By Josh Ashby

It’s been a while since I’ve had a big software challenge as most of my time of energy have been focused on BOB. Because of this, I’ve decided to make a CMS using Perl.

Thats right, the first useful thing I’m programming in Perl is yet another blogging and content management system. I decided to use Perl because it’s become the second best thing in the world, pulling in right behind Python, and because Irecently got this new web server (thanks to the parents and birthdays), I have a public place to show off my Perl. Also, Perl’s ease of use with MySQL databases, and it’s ability to handle text in a neat fashion makes it a good choice for this. Read more…

Welcome to the new joshashby.com Posted at: Fri, Nov 6th, 2009 | 1:22AM UTC By Josh Ashby

Welcome to joshashby.com.

Most will notice this site, and my old site at josh.byethost16.com look and function the same, the only difference being that this site has Perl and Python, among other things on it, which my old site does not.

To take a look at the Perl, I uploaded BOB’s website. It features a CMS that I wrote  my self (which you can find the source for in my bedroom-server github repo) with visual effects powered by MooTools, the javascript framework that softdrink on #sparkfun was kind enough to show me. You can find the site here: http://bob.joshashby.com. Hope the transition to this new server continues to go smoothly!

Websites, CMS’s, MySQL, PHP and … Perl? Posted at: Sat, Oct 24th, 2009 | 5:31PM UTC By Josh Ashby

One of the difficulties with maintaining a personal project site, such as this one (http://joshashby.com) is updating the content. Once upon a time, when my site was less than a year old and on the freeweb network, I manually opened my pages, added the content I wanted, and saved/closed the file. This worked fine for me, except for the fact that I could not modify, and update my site from any computer. Read more…