Blog

Wireless Communication

December 17, 2008

I’m working on a distributed controller for a wind power client and we have need for:
1) double redundancy in several components
2) 30 meter separation between certain stations
3) complete electrical isolation between stations
4) lightning resistance

After considering tons of wired alternatives, I came upon the Jennic 802.15.4 Zigbee radio microcontrollers development kit. See their awesome kit here.

You get up and running in no time and the microcontrollers are very full-featured. The development tools are free, which is becoming more and more of a requirement for me. I’m sick of owning 10 different compilers that are all out-of-date by the time I get around to using them on a second project.

The Zigbee is working fantastically well so far.. stay tuned for updates as I continue my development.

Getting started on iPhone Development

December 17, 2008

iPhone development is really fun, but the learning curve is steep: Xcode, Objective-C, Cocoa, iPhone. Apple has tons of great information on their development center site, but it really amounts to a bit TOO MUCH! Here’s a sane way to get started.

What are they?
Xcode: Apple’s development environment. Very clean. Free.
Objective-C: The language. Cross between C and Smalltalk. Think of it as a late-binding alternative to C++.
Cocoa: The frameworks. Container classes, UI objects, etc.
iPhone: You know this one.

First, buy Mark and LaMarche and work through it. This is a clean book that takes you all the way through developing a slew of applications. You can run them on an awesome iPhone simulator that’s built-in to the free Apple development tools called Xcode. When you’re ready, you can become a developer for $100/yr (or become a subcontractor to me for free!) and then you can run apps on a real iPhone. Here’s the book:

As you work this book, you will be having some questions about Objective-C. Here’s the book you need:

As you understand the basics of Objective-C, you also need to know all about Cocoa- no, not the kind that you drink, the kind that DRIVES you to drink. This is the Apple framework that adds containers, databases, graphics, and general high-level behavior to Objective-C. It is actually very nice, and is much cleaner and easier to grok than the .NET offering from the other company. Hillegass’ book is a favorite:

Give it a whirl and don’t hesitate to contact me for help! I’ve gone through all of this pain over the last year, so most of it is still relatively fresh in my mind. In the end, I’d say I like the Cocoa environment much more than .NET, and I like Objective-C much better than C++. Interface Builder, a part of Xcode, seems too complicated at first, but it is AWESOME. You create and connect all of your UI objects in real-time, and then just stream them out to a file for reloading in the app later. This eliminates all of the automatic code generation as in C++ and VB, and this really cleans up a great many things.
Let me know how you progress! Good luck.

Welcome to the Lecky Integration blog!

October 16, 2008

In association with our slick and clean new Website, I’ve decided to add a blog to keep everyone up-to-date on ideas, projects, and architectures that we’re working on. Please feel free to write or to subscribe, and let me know what topics you’re interested in!