Posts

A new article featured in Circuit Cellar

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February 2024, #403 issue of Circuit Cellar magazine features an article I wrote about Raspberry Pi Pico Programmable I/O Programming. It is an elusive topic, opening up many choices to speed up communications with many different types of hardware. Writing the article was my excuse to devote myself to learning the subject, as I might end up using it for an upcoming wireless controller for a biaxial test machine I published last year. 

These are not the droids you are looking for ...

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  It has been a busy year, and one of the things I have played with the most has been a few of the new AI tools, like Bard, Dall-E, Copilot, etc.  The picture on the left is, allegedly, a Raspberry Pi Pico W, but it is not even close. But it serves to illustrate my point: while sometimes you get good or decent answers, sometimes AI is just wrong.  The problem is that we use computers to get good answers, and AI is being pushed as a great tool to speed up that process, which sometimes it does splendidly. Unfortunately, it cannot be trusted.  Still, during the second half of 2023, we witnessed how AI was touted as a revolution, and it was, to a point, one of the reasons for the bull market that raised many stocks. I guess that during 2024, we will continue exploring this tools, finding out which use cases make sense and where you want to avoid using them. Meanwhile, I convinced one of the image-generating AIs to make me a suitable image to celebrate the new year (it was not trivial as th

The new Arduino UNO R4 Wi-Fi

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It has been a while since my last post, but life gets in the way sometimes. The UNO form factor and the claim it was a 5V board made me pay more attention this time to this new board from Arduino. Having an ESP32 for Wi-Fi support was a nice touch, so while I did not make it as a beta tester, I shelled out some cash and got a commercial unit as soon as it was launched.  It is not only the built-in Wi-Fi but lots of other goodies, but you cannot but love the led matrix display <3 My first experience with the board was in an M1 Mac, which was completely trouble-free. The second test was with a Windows 10 machine, and the results were not good: I could not upload code to the board even though it was detected and the port was correctly set. I searched around and discovered this is a known issue . Bummer :-( That error happened using the new 2.1.0 IDE, so I returned to the older version installed on my computer, which was a no-go too. So I think that is all about it with Windows so far.

So, how is the iPhone 13 going?

 After three months of use, I feel more comfortable with the iPhone. I think I only rebooted twice, and it seems pretty stable. I have not performed a thorough battery test, but I bet I could get four days of battery life with my usage. Usually, when I recharge it at night, I am around 80% of battery life; I reckon the most used day it was around 66%. So on that front, it is a strong performer, much better than any of the Samsung Galaxy models I have owned over the years (not sure how good the latest models are though).  Handling is good though it feels larger and heavier than my older Galaxy S10e. It takes excellent pictures, even in low light. For compatibility reasons, I changed the default photo/video format to HPEG and MOV files, though I guess it is optimized using HEIC. I was surprised that fingerprint detection was replaced by Face ID biometrics. That works well most of the time, though it might add a bit of lag and needs you to have your phone looking at you (which may not be

Babysitting ChatGPT

 After my initial excitement with chatGPT, I have been trying to use it in the real world. I needed to plan a certain programming task and I was expecting to get it done quickly and easily with the help of AI, but the result has been quite different.  The first big problem is that code tends to get cut with no warning sign. You get a snippet of code where part of it is missing. Sometimes it is more evident than others and when you mention that in the chat, the machine goes back to produce another snippet that many times is cut again. Not so smart or efficient. The only workaround I have found digging in the OpenAI discourse forum is to report the last line of the output so the machine can continue with (hopefully) the rest of the code. That approach seems to work better as I guess the culprit is the limitation of the maximum length of the output code. But the next problem is the code generated did not work. Sometimes the reason was quite evident like they are trying to use a data type

From Android to iOS

 Against my better judgment, I am moving away from Android and into Apple claws. The fact that Samsung has consistently priced its Galaxy line above almost anyone else is not helping. Not an Apple hater here so I thought I could give the iPhone 13 a try.  I was not eager to make such a switch as I dreaded moving all the apps to another system and keeping my data in the process. My wife did a while ago and lost all the WhatsApp messages in the process no matter how hard we tried. Meta is mostly the one to blame in my opinion.  So how was the move?  In a nutshell, not good.  I installed the Android app made by Apple to ease the transition. I selected I wanted to move all my data and apps together with WhatsApp messages. The Android and iPhone told me it would take 41 minutes, later just 22 minutes, which lasted several hours. Oddly, the Android transfer seemed to keep working at a slow pace while it looked stuck to 22 minutes on the iPhone side. Frustrated I went to bed.  The next mornin

The future of programming

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I am following the Advent of Code 2022 programming event. I was about to say contest, but I wonder if that would be the correct name. Anyway, AoC presents different programming challenges to the users to be solved daily from December 1st to 25th.  The humorous problem statements and quite doable problems make it a fun programming experience that does not use much of your time. But what shocked me this year was that GPT-3 was being used to solve problems at lightning speed .  Once I opened an OpenAI account, I could try how good this thing is at solving programming exercises. I see the system is powerful enough to solve many programming quizzes I wrote for my students. It even handles them if written in Spanish.  And it is not only that you get some code as a result, but you can keep asking for refinements in case the first version does not have all the required features. Of course, to provide such a level of guidance, you need to be knowledgeable about programming, but now I will be p