My MateDealer project was entirely written in C because the Arduino IDE or more detailed the HardwareSerial part lacks the 9-bit support. It is easy to send a 8 bit data frame, but nearly impossible to do that with 9 bit frames. I worked for a while on implementing 9-bit support for the Arduino IDE and recently i finished my work!

I’ve recently bought a few SparkFun ProMicro 5V 16Mhz clones from Ebay because they are extremely cheap (7 Euro each) and habe native USB. The only problem i had is that i was not able to program them using inotool .

I’ve tried to generate the locales on my Raspberry Pi, but i ran into a problem that i was not able to solve for a few hours. root@rpi: ~$ locale-gen Generating locales... en_US.UTF-8.../usr/bin/locale-gen: line 41: 303 Killed localedef -i $input -c -f $charset -A /usr/share/locale/locale.alias $locale locale gave me another error root@rpi: ~$ locale locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory LANG=en_US.

I’ve worked with the Java based Arduino IDE for a long time now, and always thought that i miss the comfort of vim. But for soom reason i never searched for an alternative, but yesterday i had enough of that shit piece of software! Ino 🔗So i googled a bit to find an alternative and stumbled upon ino . After a few test i must say that ino is exactly what i was looking for :-) Take a look at the quickstart to see how easy it is.

I work on a project that has a form including a map, so a logged in user can enter his data and drawing features on the map and save it afterwards. The user gets a page that shows the map with the features on it. I will show how to save and restore the drawn data as geoJSON and how to save circles because that type of feature is not supported by geoJSON.

Because i’ve got a lot of emails during the last year with several questions about my MDB projects, i try to answer them here.

Making web uploads less painfull 🔗For one of my current Flask projects i want to have a nice looking and easy to use file upload form. That means no input type="file" form field where i have to select each file and the upload it on at a time. I came across this nice tutorial for a HTML5/jquery file uploader, but the backend is written in PHP. So I decided to try to get this working with Flask and it was easier as I supposed :-)

I finally activated the Disqus comment system for my blog. I wanted to do this for a while now but was to lazy to do it :-)

I do a few webprojects with Flask and I love it! While creating a template i searched for a way to call functions from within the template, and found out that i can use a @app.context_processor decorator.

The problem 🔗I have built a PCB drill that works nice most of the time, but sometimes it occurs that the stepper motor don’t perform a full turn. This is caused by the friction of the eccentric tappet. I’ve simply made it out of a piece of steel rod, with a hole outside of its center. That tappet pushes a brass screw upwards. I thought that this will work fine, but it does not (sometimes).