False Alarm. Also, Teensy

It turns out that I jumped the gun putting up that dragon emblem¹, so you won't be rid of me as soon as I was expecting. I did end up putting some hours into the PostScript generator port over to Common Lisp², but I also had to get something to play around with this weekend, in the absence of any Nords.

Actually, now that I think about it, I'm not sure I ever mentioned my dalliance with embedded programming. In an effort to add a capitol C logo³ to the header there, and to have some fun with low-level electronics, I bought up an [Arduino Uno](http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/arduinoBoardUno) a while ago⁴. This is probably going to incinerate what little programmer cred I have, but I couldn't for the life of me get [the damn IDE](http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/arduinoBoardUno) to actually upload a program to the chip. This was a while too; the board has been sitting there disused, still retaining the default blink program it was shipped with. I've looked at various potential fixes including getting a more recent version from the repos, downloading the official tarballs from the Arduino site, and toying with some command line utilities to program the thing without that fucking annoying little collection of big shiny icons. I officially give up. That removable Atmega328 may get re-purposed at some point, but I'm not sinking another hour into figuring out exactly why the programming tools don't seem to recognize the board.

I mentioned that I wanted something else to keep me busy through the weekend⁵, so I ended up hitting up my local electronics store for a [Teensy 2.0](http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/). The funny part, to me at least, is that the little packing slip that came with this chip states

Programming Teensy with C provides access to all features. Experience with the C language and reading technical specifications is helpful. For a beginner oriented environment, [the] Arduino may be a better choice.

The reason that's slightly amusing is that, as I mentioned, the Arduino constantly drove me to frustration. By contrast, I got the Teensy up and running in under ten minutes by following the Getting Started tutorial. It boils down to

• Install the required libraries (apt-get install gcc-avr binutils-avr avr-libc libusb-dev)
• Download the loader program (either the binary version for your architecture, or the source. Remember to run make if you go with the source version.)
• Plug in the Teensy
• Press the pushbutton to activate the HalfKay loader
• Load your code onto it (either by running the GUI, or by using ./teensy_loader_cli -mmcu=[your processor here] -wv program.hex)

That's that.

I haven't actually started anything yet, but I plan to go through the listings of a few projects to warm up, hopefully culminating in a build of a Chordite and addition of a new logo in a little while.

1. Canada Post cheekily celebrates Remembrance Day, so I'll actually have to wait until Tuesday or so to actually get my hands on my RPG fix for the year.↩
2. And it looks about as good so far, though I still need to get my head firmly around dictionaries.↩
3. Hello from April of 2016! At this point, I've written enough things in C that I could truthfully add it to the logo bar if I wanted to. Having written my own Scheme, a couple simple garbage collectors, a Forth implementation, and a few embedded projects (some of which I've actually been paid for), bThere's a point to all this, I swear.↩
4. The old one with the removable Atmega chip, rather than the new one with the tiny but soldered unit.↩
5. As if I didn't already have enough projects in the air.↩