About
Despite the fact that this blog has been in existence for quite a while now, I never bothered to actually write something about the guy who writes it. Today I finally added an About Me page. If you know me there’s probably not a whole lot of information there that you didn’t already know but /meh.
Also, the MSP430 LaunchPad that I’ve mentioned a few posts back has been tagged ‘unobtanium’ on TI’s website. I like it. 
Poof
Bah. I was going to use an old Playstation controller for a small project. I used it before and was going to re-use the old code so it *should* have been pretty simple. Until I made a tiny little mistake and the magic smoke came out.
I opened it and surprise surprise, a filter cap is blown out. A little investigation showed that Sony didn’t really want to build these controllers to high standards: the capacitor in question has a *very* narrow voltage tolerance and is a really cheap type that doesn’t even have the pressure relief (the little grooves in the top) that capacitors usually have. So the top of the capacitor just blew off the bottom and there was capacitor goo all over the cheapass little PCB.
Replacing the capacitor won’t solve anything, the main chip of the controller is also blown. This one is never going to be useful again.
*sigh*
Maybe I’ll check Ebay or something for some old controllers. They’re still fun to play with.
Olimex ARM-USB-OCD & Win7 64-bit
So, occasionally I play with ARM processors, and when I do so I talk to the chips using a JTAG interface. Specifically, I use the ARM-USB-OCD from Olimex, which is a pretty neat device and inexpensive (or at least, compared to other products on the market, and not counting crappy parallel port/Wiggler type interfaces, which suck). And it comes with a built-in power supply and additional serial port which is awesome.
The only real issue I was having is getting it to work on my laptop, which runs Windows 7, 64-bit. The device uses a standard FT2232L chip, but with a customized Vendor/Product ID, so the drivers from the Olimex website won’t work with it directly, and as you may know Windows 7 can be a real bitch with drivers, especially in 64-bit.
Anyway, I finally got it to work and figured I’m not the only one who ran into this problem, so I thought I’d share the driver I used. (I modified it from the standard FTDI drivers).
To install, unzip the folder somewhere, go to the Device Manager, open the properties for the ARM-USB-OCD (it shows up twice: one for the JTAG interface, one for the serial port), find the ‘Update Drivers’ button, browse to the folder where you extracted the drivers, and voila. It will probably ask you to confirm you want to install an unverified driver, obviously you’ll have to accept there. No worries, it’s just the FTDI driver modified to accept the ARM-USB-OCD’s VID/PID combination.
Anyway, here it is: Olimex ARM-USB-OCD drivers for Windows 7 64-bit (and pretty much all other Windows versions too) – 1.18 MB
TI LaunchPad
TI (Texas Instruments) released a neat little product a while back: the MSP430 LaunchPad Value Line Development Kit, as they call it. It’s a basic introductory kit to their MSP430 line of microcontrollers. At just $4.something they are pretty much a complete giveaway, its impossible for TI to make any money at all on them. But then again, their point is not to make money but to introduce people to their micros, and well, at that price its a pretty good starting point for anyone.
But TI, why, why did you have to make it so difficult to buy them?
On the TI store, the first obstacle is registration. The account registration form just does not work in Firefox. You can fill it out and click submit… and it’ll say you havn’t completed any of the fields. Then, once you eventually get to the checkout page, the damn thing wants so much (detailed) information from you.. It’s just ridiculous. At the nth form where I had to make up all sorts of stuff just to get past that page I gave up.
Mouser doesn’t have any of these kits in stock and they’re on backorder which will take roughly forever, and at the lack of another place where I can buy it… Sorry, TI. You really missed your chance there.