Wednesday, June 6, 2012

A new weapon in the war against Bugs and Photino Birds

Keil μVision 4 Debugger/Simulator. This is a small part of the larger (450MB, really guys?) μVision suite, but the only part I care about. With it I was able to debug my Task code, which is interesting given that I did not write or compile my code in μVision. Get the program and install it (it installs fine under Wine on Linux) and then bring up any example project, compile it, and get into debug mode. Then, right-click the disassembly window and select "Load Hex or Object File...". Now select the master .elf file that was compiled with GnuARM. It will load, and the simulated processor will be reset, so it starts at location 0 (of your code, apparently it skips the ISP).

And now for a word (or thousand) about tasks...

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

There's a little black spot on the sun today...

I saw it! I owed it to Captain Cook to make my best effort to see the transit (insert 100+ years, 2117, etc) and I did.


OK, I didn't directly see it, but I did the next best thing, see it with a projection system. I had my binoculars pointed straight at the sun, then held up a white (so as to see it) box (so as to not blow around in the wind) as a screen. I used the shadow of the binocs to aim, and then used the focusing knob to, well, focus. I have previously seen sunspots with this setup, but it was too cloudy to really see them today.

Speaking of which, today is a partly cloudy day here at St Kwan's, and I was clouded out of seeing ingress. These images are from about 00:10 UTC 6 Jun 2012.