brad wrote:Maybe you could write about using microcontroller interrupts
It's 6502-oriented, but I have an article on interrupts at
http://6502.org/tutorials/interrupts.html . (Enjoy my very outdated cartoons!)
or how to solder surface mount components.
I've done SOJs where you use a 1/8" tip that covers three pins at once, tack a couple of corners of the IC to hold it in place, then make a big bridge mess down both sides, then hold the board and row of pins vertically and go top to bottom, melting the solder again, and all the excess solder comes off on the iron, leaving just the right amount on every pin, and no bridges. It's amazing how well it works. It would be great if someone would post a video of that kind of thing.
The list goes on!
So if you feel that you have something that others would benefit from learning about, then by all means - post it!
There's a list of my articles at
http://wilsonminesco.com/GarthArticleLinks.html, mostly 6502-oriented but quite a few have applicability to other processors and microcontrollers too.
The newest feature of my website is
simple methods for multitasking without a multitasking OS, for systems that lack the resources for a multitasking OS, or where hard realtime requirements would rule one out anyway.
One of the sections of the website which surprisingly gets the most traffic even though there's no conversation about it in emails or the 6502.org forum is about
large look-up tables for hyperfast, accurate 16-Bit scaled-integer math, including trig & log functions.
The
Circuit Potpourri page is actually section 22 of the
6502 primer about building your own 6502 computer, which is mostly about hardware aspects but touches on software a little too. The circuit potpourri page is just that-- a collection of ways to interface more than you probably imagined to your microprocessor project.
I have an RS-232 primer at
http://wilsonminesco.com/RS-232/RS-232primer.html. (My apologies-- there aren't many pictures and diagrams at the beginning; but it should be clear and helpful anyway.)
There's I2C-6, a proposed connector standard for I²C, suitable for breadboarding, at
http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2155 . (This one is on the 6502.org forum.)
The 65SIB specification is at
http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?t=1064&start=105 (on the 6502.org forum). This is a serial interface bus, compatible with SPI but more flexible. It uses a daisychain of ribbon cables to go from one outboard device to the next (so the host only needs one port to communicate with lots of devices), with autoaddressing and other valuable features. It can communicate with anything from dumb shift registers up to very intelligent devices. The "65" in the name is just because we hashed it out on the 6502.org forum; but there's nothing that particularly ties it to the 6502 or other 65-family processors.
I have more articles linked on the first page mentioned above.
For nearly the last couple of years, I've been slowly working on my next major website feature, a treatise on stacks. It will have about 16 chapters, starting with the basics (subroutine returns, then interrupts), and working through virtual data stacks, stack addressing, parameter-passing, inlined data, RPN operations, local variables and environments and recursion, how a stack is used when compiling or assembling nestable program structures, stack frames, and other things, stopping just as we get into multitasking where you assign each task its own stack(s) in the stack area(s) of memory. It was looking like I bit off more than I could chew, from a standpoint of how much work it was. It sat collecting dust for nearly a year, but I've been able to work on it a lot again in the last two months. If you have ideas or questions you want to see addressed, please let me know. It's 6502-oriented, but will have applicability to other processors as well. I don't know of anything like this on the internet.