Tech Notes – Page 49 – Kev's Development Toolbox

December 31, 2014

Wiring an Adafruit i2c LCD Pi Plate to an Arduino

I have an Adafruit i2c 2 line LCD Pi Plate that I’ve used for projects with my Raspberry Pi. It has a block of header pins that slot down onto the GPIO pins on the Pi. It seems that it’s pretty similar to other LCDs for the Arduino, so with some reading around and experimenting, it does wire up and work perfectly with the Arduino too. This post gave the me starting point for what pins wired to where.

In summary, this is how I wired it up – the Raspberry Pi pin references are the pin names that the Pi Plate would normally connect to, and which Arduino pins I connected them to:

Pi Plate Pin -> Arduino Pin

Pin2 -> 5v

Pin6/grnd -> grnd

Pin3 -> A4/SDA

Pin5 -> A5/SCL

The Adafruit LCD Arduino library works with the LCD Pi Plate without any other changes.

November 12, 2014

Microsoft .NET now Open Source?

This is a turn up for the books. Who would have thought this would even have been a option a few years back. Microsoft is open sourcing .NET, making the source available on GitHub, and even plans to make the framework cross platform to run on Linux and Mac – more here.

One can only speculate that they feel pressured to do this for .NET to stay relevant, and/or to expand it’s usage to other platforms outside of Windows? Given the accelerating trend to deploy to the cloud on virtualized platforms (in most cases on OSes almost certainly not to be Microsoft Windows), maybe Microsoft sees this as a strategic move for them to keep their development framework an option in this changing landscape?

October 18, 2014

Mac OS X Yosemite

Ars Technica has a fantastically detailed review (25 pages) of the latest OS X release, Yosemite. I’m browsing though the article as my 5.1GB download is slowly coming across the tubes. Maybe sometime tonight it will have completed and I’ll be ready to install 🙂

In the meantime, I’m wondering whether I like the ‘flat’ UI look, and prefer the 3d style icons and shadows in my dock, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

October 12, 2014

Parallels 9 update for Mac OS X 10.9.5

Just tried to start up Parallels and got an error message that the Parallels service could not start – the link to this article says this is due to the last OS X update, and there’s a link to a download for an update to Parallels to address the issue.