It’s mental health awareness week – and I wanted to write something on that topic. This is kind of difficult for me, as it’s not a topic I often speak openly about – but I live with chronic anxiety & depression. I was first diagnosed some years ago in 2012 – and making that first […]
Understanding Hello World – on Raspberry Pi
Like so many other people, over the last few weeks of lockdown, I’ve been trying to use the extra time that I’m not spending commuting to work to learn some new skills that I’ve always meant to get around to learning. In particular, I been teaching myself ARM Assembly Language programming. I’ve always been more […]
A Giant 555…
I’ve not actually written anything here for quite some time (it turns out that doing a part-time PhD really eats into your electronics project time… Who’d’ve thought!); so I thought I’d take advantage of the current isolation and a few days off over the Bank Holiday, to catch-up with some blogging… The venerable NE555 timer […]
UNI-T UT802 – First Impressions…
It’s been a while since I’ve written much here – but I have just made a short video on the UNI-T UT802 bench-top multimeter that I bought recently. As I say in the video; I plan to make a more detailed video doing some comparative measurements – to see where this unit ranks alongside other […]
Advanced C++ / Python integration with Boost.Python (Part 3)
In this final part of the series I’m going to look at one further way we can use Boost.Python to help when using a C++ class within Python. In the previous part we built a wrapper for a C++ class, exposing a number of class methods to Python. However, in Python, it’s quite typical for […]
Advanced C++ / Python integration with Boost.Python (Part 2)
Last time we looked at how to use Boost.Python to wrap a very simple piece of C++ code. This time we’re going to take that one step further along, and do the same thing for a more complex C++ example – which includes a C++ Class. For the purposes of this example – let us […]
Advanced C++ / Python integration with Boost.Python
In a previous post, I described how you could use the ctypes Python library to import a C++ class to make it usable from within Python. There is however, another way to do this; and that’s by using Boost.Python (which as the name suggests is a part of the Boost C++ library suite). Whilst this […]
Tristate Multiplexing
Tristate multiplexing (or Charlieplexing) is a simple to use technique to expand the number of LEDs that you can light from a simple microcontroller. This post explores the concept, and looks at some interesting calculations we can do when thinking about them. I’ve been meaning to get around to writing something of a tutorial on […]
Calling C++ Classes from Python, with ctypes…
I recently found myself needing to call a C++ class from within Python. I didn’t want to call a separate process (as I had previously when using Thrift – see Using Apache Thrift for Python & C++); but rather to call a C++ library directly. Before I go on I should say that there are a […]
Simple Python Hello World with Alexa
I’ve recently got myself an Amazon Echo Dot; Amazon’s speech-based, voice-controlled device using Amazon’s Alexa, digital assistant. They’re pretty nice devices; and they’re quite fun to play with (and not too expensive either) – though I’ve not had it long enough to say if it’s actually useful yet… Obviously the first thing that I did with […]