Part I: CPU (6507) Part II: Cartridge Part III: TIA (Video chip) Part IV: Clock and Composite Video Part V: RIOT (RAM, I/O, Timer) and Audio Part VI: Joystick, switches, fixes and wrapping up Introduction A year ago, Ben Heck hand-soldered an Atari 2600 on a protoboard (and, as usual, turned that into a portable console). The idea of manually re-assembling the console for which I had already hacked together a game and an emulator sounded very exciting (and educational) for me.

Bluetooth Smart is an emerging short range wireless technology aimed for low power devices. Bluetooth 4.2 core specification provides various methods to secure the communication between devices and establish trusted connections. This paper describes the design considerations to secure the Bluetooth smart devices. 1. Introduction Bluetooth smart (also known as Bluetooth low energy or BLE) is introduced in the legacy Bluetooth 4.0 specification by Bluetooth special interest group. Bluetooth smart is primarily designed for low power embedded devices with limited computation capabilities.

Well, I got impatient and waited only two months (rather than a year) to buy my new laptop. I went with the “New” Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition, the 9360 model to be exact. The model I picked came bundled with a Dell-supported version of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and so is $150 CAD cheaper than with Windows 10 Pro. Also the UEFI firmware seems to be fully unlocked. Apart from a few infrequent glitches (I’ll write a separate post about working around these), everything works great out of the box.

One day I decided to install an alternative firmware on my NETGEAR N600 in order to tweak lower-level settings and try to minimize frequent (and very frustrating) disconnections on Splatoon. But the setup failed, effectively bricking the router. “No sweat”, I thought, “let me just put it into some sort of recovery mode and flash the original firmware into it”. For this router, the idea would be to transfer the firmware via TFTP - which works by setting up a computer with fixed TCP/IP configs and starting the transfer at the right time during the boot process.

When I saw this person building a Raspberry Pi inside a vintage Apple Keyboard, I thought it could be a comfortable way to play Apple II games on a TV. More important, I happen to have an Apple Extended Keyboard II just waiting for such an experiment… My winter holiday plans did not include going outside, so I wanted to build it with parts I already had. But the hack uses an Arduino Pro Micro (with a little help of the TMK Keyboard Firmware Collection) as a converter between ADB (the interface used by the Apple IIGS and older Macs) and the familiar USB, and I only had a regular Arduino (actually, a Leonardo-compatible clone).

For the past few months, I’ve been playing around with the new Web Bluetooth API which is about to ship in Chrome 56 in February 2017. And let me tell you, this new feature just unlocked lots of new possibilities for the Web. As a Web Advocate, I was so excited and couldn’t wait to build an application showing how easy it is to combine Angular and the Web Bluetooth API (even more, with any of the upcoming Web APIs, more on that soon, stay tuned).

Earlier this year I was looking for an app that showed predictions for Toronto streetcars/buses on my Pebble smartwatch. To my surprise, I could not find a single one that worked the way I expected it to (or that worked at all, to be honest), so I decided to build my own. Little did I know that getting fast and reliable predictions on my wrist wasn’t just a matter of writing C code on the watch - it also required code running on the phone and on a server.

An iBeacon app relies on an active Bluetooth connection to detect the beacons around it. Without bluetooth, the app wouldn’t know when to trigger certain location related features. Handling bluetooth settings and permissions on the iPhone can sometimes be tricky. If you don’t request permissions correct and check the phone’s status in the right order, development and testing can become more of a frustration than it needs to be. Here’s how each step of the process should be handled: