This is for all you engineering geeks out there. I ran across this yesterday and found it very interesting:
http://wiring.org.co/
"Wiring" is a C-like programming language and IDE for the Atmel ATmega128 AVR microcontroller. The language has some neat features and seems to be both lightweight enough and powerful enough to be useful for real projects. It compiles to native AVR code, not interpreted bytecode, and supports all the AVR's on-chip peripherals plus a few different external interrupts. It's all free and open source and they seem to have made it pretty easy to implement your own library add-ons to interface with your own devices. The list of built-in libraries is pretty substantial - out of the box it supports talking to a serial LCD, driving servos, reading various encoders and sensors, etc. There is also a prebuilt board you can buy for $40-$60 that you can load code straight into.
To somebody with a lot of AVR experience this is probably nothing new, but I really like the way they've put it together in order to lower the learning curve and try to get more people exposed to microcontrollers. I'm a PIC guy from way back, so if I ever decided to start playing with AVR's I'd probably look into this instead of trying to learn Atmel's tools. For the kinds of hobbyist projects I might do in my spare time (hah!) Wiring seems to be a natural fit.
So why am I posting this geek stuff on VAF? Well, basically I thought it might be of interest to folks who are building an RV and have a desire to implement some simple custom control circuitry in their airplane without going through the hassle and expense of designing and building a board and getting up to speed on the gory details of programming some particular vendor's microcontrollers. Nobody is ever going to use Wiring to develop a glass cockpit display, but I could certainly imagine using Wiring to build simpler things like a trim servo controller, annunciator panel driver, engine preheater timer, light dimmer, voltage monitor, automatic air compressor drainer, flight data recorder, APRS thingy, etc... the list of potential applications is surprisingly long.
If none of this made sense to you, sorry for throwing around so many buzzwords! I know there's a few of you guys out there for whom this might be right up your alley... and for the merely curious, maybe this could be one way for you to make your RV do something really cool that nobody else has seen before. Who knows, you might even turn into an embedded software geek like me.
cheers,
mcb
Wiring - the programming language
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