Andys

For only $15-$20 there's a lot more at play here than you might expect. The removable shutter button, tripod functionality, and the overall build quality make this one worth every penny.

Donald Trump promised to "drain the swamp" if he was elected. So how's he doing? I figured I could perform a public service by keeping track of his swamp-draining efforts as he appoints his new cabinet. Here's the scorecard as of today:

Hour of Code @ Raspberry Pi.

At Raspberry Pi Towers our magic helper elves have been working around the clock to bring you some fantastically festive Hour of Code activities
There’s something for all ages and abilities in our tasty selection box, including quizzes, spinny flowers, Santa detectors, musical delights and even snowflake design. Put an hour aside, pull up a Raspberry Pi and tuck in!

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What’s hour of code?

The Hour of Code is a global movement reaching tens of millions of students in 180+ countries. Anyone, anywhere can organize an Hour of Code event. One-hour tutorials are available in over 30 languages. No experience needed. Ages 4 to 104.

Anybody can host an Hour of Code anytime, but the grassroots campaign goal is for tens of millions of students to try an Hour of Code during December 8-14, 2014, in celebration of Computer Science Education Week. Is it one specific hour? No. You can do the Hour of Code anytime during this week. (And if you can’t do it during that week, do it the week before or after).

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Very few people know assembly. [Luto] seeks to make learning assembly just a little bit easier with his “fully functional web-based assembler development environment, including a real assembler, emulator and debugger.”

These days, you can be a microcontroller expert without knowing a thing about assembly. While you don’t NEED to know assembly, it actually can help you understand quite a bit about embedded programming and how your C code actually works. Writing a small part of your code in assembly can reduce code size and speed things up quite a bit. It also can result in some very cool projects, such as using Java to program microcontrollers.

With high quality example code, it is very easy to get started learning assembly. The emulator consists of a microcontroller with 32 registers, hooked up to three LEDs, two buttons, and a potentiometer. This is way better than painfully learning assembly on real hardware. Be sure to check out the online demo! Being able to step through each line of code and clearly see the result help make assembly easier to use and understand. It would be great to see this kind of tool widely adopted in engineering programs.

Have you used assembly in any of your projects? Let us know how it went and why you choose to use assembly

Filed under: Microcontrollers

AKOP —the Altoids Knock-Offs Project.

AKOP —the Altoids Knock-Offs Project — is a collection of customized logos inspired to the Altoids one, the logos are intended to be for personal fun and as an homage to Altoids boxes.

Whether you have an older device or Google Now just isn't particularly speedy on yours, this simple tweak to its settings will speed it up dramatically for you. All you have to do is tell it not to search some of the local content on your device and go straight to the web—which is where what you want likely is, anyway.

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