Spinning Up Embedded Control Projects
By Jon Williams
May 2009, Page 68
Get in touch with your Propeller side.

The Power Of Networking
By Jon Williams
January 2008, Page 14
For an actor attempting to make his way in Hollywood, the word “networking” takes on a whole host of meanings. It’s a crazy business, really, and what most of us find is that those with the same goals, e.g., becoming an established actor, are not abundantly helpful to each other (a few are downright malicious). So, “networking” — actor to actor, that is — is mostly bupkis in my book. Now, I do have a “Hollywood” network, but the only actors in it are very well established, if not particularly...

More Surplus Success
By Jon Williams
May 2008, Page 16
I may have mentioned my friend Brian once or twice. Brian’s a great guy — a super smart IT professional by day and a bring-down-the house DJ by night. When I lived in Dallas, Brian was a tad jealous because I had Tanner (geek heaven) within minutes of my home. So, I move back to Los Angeles a couple years ago and no more Tanner for me (and I miss them). But, what do I have? That’s right! All Electronics — another gate into geek heaven. Brian was beside himself; what luck I have with my proximity

Expirements With Sound
By Jon Williams
September 2008, Page 60
It would be more than fair to say that I’m a light sleeper. To be honest, I don’t think that I have ever slept for more than a couple hours at a stretch. Don’t get me wrong, I tie a few of those stretches together each night (well, most nights) so that I’m rested in the morning, but I’m certain that I have never slept all the way through the night. I’m not talking about tossing and turning, mind you, I’m talking about full wake-up — usually at the end of a vivid dream or nightmare...

Control from the Couch - Redux
By Jon Williams
January 2009, Page 18
With the SX and SX/B I think it's time to revisit SIRCs decoding and even couple it with serial I/O so that we can enable dual-mode control (IR plus serial) or have the ability to use our project as an IR-to-serial translator.

STAMP APPLICATIONS
By Jon Williams
May 2004, Page 0
One of the great things about my job — aside from the fact that I get to work with BASIC Stamps all day long (and get paid for it!) — is the customer contact I am able to have. Almost all of my contacts are very friendly and find what I get to do here with Nuts & Volts useful — sometimes even a bit entertaining. Often, I get messages that are cries for help and I always enjoy helping, when I can. From time to time, a customer will alert me to a part that I hadn’t previously worked with...

STAMP APPLICATIONS
By Jon Williams
July 2004, Page 0
If you ask my close friends, they’ll tell you that I’m as stubborn as a mule, yet I maintain the right to be human; therefore, the right to be wrong. I’d like to think that, when I am wrong, I admit it — I try, anyway.

STAMP APPLICATIONS
By Jon Williams
September 2004, Page 0
On a recent return trip from Starbucks, I noticed myself doing something that actually made me laugh. While steering with my left had, I would reach down with my right hand to adjust the coffee spout such that coffee would not slosh out while I was cornering. Honestly, I laughed out loud, then immediately thought that, if I had an accelerometer, a stepper motor, and a BASIC Stamp, I could keep both hands on the wheel. An idea was born ...

I2C Again — and the Case for Continuous Improvement
By Jon Williams
November 2004, Page 0
I get the idea that a lot of BASIC Stamp users have discovered the fun and utility of the myriad (over 1,000) of I2C devices available today — even those users that don’t have the BS2p or BS2pe with the built-in I2COUT and I2CIN instructions.

Timing Is Everything
By Jon Williams
January 2005, Page 0
It wasn’t very long after the BASIC Stamp and other BASIC language microcontrollers appeared that advanced users started asking about using interrupts. Well, neither the Basic Stamp family nor — to my knowledge — any of the micros in the same class supports true interrupts...

Ping… I See You
By Jon Williams
March 2005, Page 0
Let’s start from the beginning. Why should we even bother with conditional compilation? Well, it depends, really. If we’re going to write a program that will never (yeah, right ...) need to run on another BS2 family module, then we don’t need to bother. What if, however, we want to share our cool program with a friend who uses a different module?

The Parallax PBD - Freedom to Create
By Jon Williams
May 2005, Page 66
When I first started working for Parallax my boss, Ken, handed me a big development board and said, “See what you can do with this.” The board was, of course, the original NX-1000, and Ken and I went on to create StampWorks around it. Even after StampWorks, the NX-1000 never left my desk; it was the perfect “playground” for my experiments, and many of my projects forthis column originated on the NX-1000 development board.

Getting Hot, Hot, Hot
By Jon Williams
July 2005, Page 26
Like the BASIC Stamp, the Maxim/Dallas DS1620 has been around a long time and has been a big part of my temperature-based projects. Yet in all this time, I had never explored the high-resolution use of the DS1620. “High resolution?” you ask. Yeah. With just a little bit of extra work, we can get temperature resolution to 0.05 degrees Celsius (0.09 degrees Fahrenheit) from our old stand-by. How is this possible?

Tricks And Treats With LEDs
By Jon Williams
October 2005, Page 14
October — it’s finally here! It’s time to build (okay, finish building) our Halloween displays — whether they’re used in yard decorations or in a full-blown, professional haunt. Nothing adds spooky ambience like a candle in a darkened room, but candles can be dangerous — unless you build them yourself and substitute the coolness of LEDs for the heat of an open flame.

Playstation Robot Controller
By Jon Williams
January 2006, Page 18
For all the columns I’ve written, clearly one of the top three in reader interest was called “PlayStation Control Redux” (September 2003) where we delved more deeply into the PlayStation controller protocol work started by Aaron Dahlen. Well, between then and now, Parallax released the SX/B compiler for the SX micro and the speed issues we dealt with when using a BASIC Stamp are no longer issues. That, and Ken is building a cool new treaded robot that might need a full-featured control device...

Wading The BS1 Debug Stream
By Jon Williams
March 2006, Page 12
For those of you that have been around for a long time, or have taken the time to go back through past issues of this column, you may remember that Scott Edwards tackled this subject back in October of 1996. Scott was able to [correctly] deduce most of the aspects of the BS1 DEBUG stream through empirical observation. I have the advantage of working “on the inside” and, after spending an hour chatting with our compiler engineer, it’s my intent to show you how to use the BS1’s DEBUG output in you

The Object Of The Machine
By Jon Williams
May 2006, Page 74
So, is your head spinning after last month’s introduction to the Propeller chip? Don’t worry, it happens to all of us, and I promise that after a bit of time things will begin to click, a big smile will cross your face, and wonderful things you thought never possible will start happening. Last month we talked about the Spin programming language being object oriented, but didn’t really take advantage of it. Let’s change that, shall we?

A Tale Of Two Props
By Jon Williams
July 2006, Page 82
After spending a few months with Parallax's newest controller - the Propeller chip - why not step back in time a bit (13 years!) and work with the oldest, the venerable BS1 - the controller that started it all for Parallax.

SX/B Turns Sweet 16
By Jon Williams
September 2006, Page 12
There are those — the pessimists among us — that will insist that you can’t get anything worthwhile for nothing; everything has a price. Not so with SX/B. While it may not compete with big, “professional” compilers, in the right hands (i.e., yours) and with a few tricks, SX/B is quite capable and costs absolutely zero dollars. And with the cost of the SX-Key programming tool and SX Proto Boards so low these days, it’s really hard to ignore the SX micro as a viable solution...

Hacking The Parallax GPS Module
By Jon Williams
November 2006, Page 96
In September, we talked about exciting new updates in the SX/B compiler and now we’re going to put a few of them to use with a cool new GPS product from Parallax. This isn’t just another GPS module. It was specifically designed to be hacker-friendly. How? Well, it uses an SX20 and the firmware was written in SX/B — and you can download this code from Parallax. Better still, is the addition of several nondescript pads on the PDB...

Stamp Applications
By Jon Williams
January 2007, Page 12
Having been a part of the BASIC Stamp community since 1994, I’ve had the wonderfully-good fortune to meet a lot of experimenters, and — due to my exposure through Nuts & Volts and six years with Parallax — I’ve been asked to create a wide variety of projects. One of the most frequently requested, but that is not really practical with a BASIC Stamp, is a Pinewood Derby racing timer. Well, now that programming the SX is nearly as easy as programming the BASIC Stamp...

Control Virtually Anything… Virtually
By Jon Williams
May 2007, Page 0
When the SX microcontroller was developed, the core philosophy was to create a chip fast enough and clean enough that most specialized peripherals could be made “virtual,” that is, created in code...

Where’s Waldo?
By Jon Williams
September 2007, Page 80
It seems like the animation controller from May was a hit. I got a lot of very positive email and many readers have been creating derivative applications for controlling servos..