Technology According to Christophe VG

Somewhere around the end of 1983, computers entered my life, and have never checked out ever since. Pasionate about interacting with these machines, programming languages have always been my favorite topic. This love for languages evolved towards a love for software architecture, doing the right thing with the right tools in the right way.

After roughly 30 years doing (mostly administrative) software, I decided to take a leap and move into the hardware world, more specifically the area of embedded systems.

If you’re new to and interested in electronics and embedded systems, you might want to read my first steps in electronics and my first steps in embedded systems as a guide from nothing to something.

These two pages serve as an introduction and are basically a guided index through most of the other pages in this section.

ATMEGA 168

16 minute read

The Atmel ATMEGA168 was the first MCU I programmed completely by myself, and it’s true what they say: when, after hours of fiddling and reviewing the circuit...

C3PO Luisterbox

2 minute read

In het kader van het C3PO - Collaborative City Co-design PlatfOrm contacteerde Studio Dott mij voor de ontwikkeling van een interactieve luisterbox.

Connected Lightbulb

4 minute read

Not everything has to be all work and no play. Sometimes, we just play. My good friend Anthony sometimes hosts team building events. His current topic of cho...

EZRPi

9 minute read

The EZRPi is a Raspberry Pi HAT, carrying a Silicon Labs EZR32 Sub-GHz wireless microcontroller (MCU), that adds subGHz radio capabilities to the RPi.

Eagle

1 minute read

I started using Eagle when I designed the Fri3d Camp badge, my first solo-SMD project. This section is devoted to my notes on learning and using it.

Electronics - first steps

8 minute read

While doing research for possible master thesis topics, I’m looking into the idea of wireless sensor network. At KULeuven the DISTRINET research group is spe...

Fri3d Badge

1 minute read

In 2014 Anthony and I hacked together the first edition of Fri3d Camp, a family-friendly hacker camp. Two years later, we did it again, now with a team of 8 ...

Hello Embedded World

2 minute read

While doing research for possible master thesis topics, I’m looking into the idea of wireless sensor network. At KULeuven the DISTRINET research group is spe...

Inspection Robot

1 minute read

In 2015 I was contracted by a very large industrial/pharmaceutical company to design and implement a solution for their QA team to be able to inspect certain...

JTAGICE mkII

2 minute read

There are many programmers, but because I know I’ll also will need to debug stuff on my MCU’s, I decided to buy the more advanced JTAGICE mkII.

MAX232

4 minute read

What do real programmers use to debug software ? Right, printf. And that’s what I also want to do from my ATMEGA168. So let’s add a serial interface to the b...

MacOS

less than 1 minute read

MacOS doesn’t need much notes - it’s simply that good ;-)

MacTex and KULEMT

2 minute read

For my master thesis, I needed to get the KUL Engineering Master Thesis Class working with MacTex. This page describes this process. It is based on the infor...

MongoDB Notes

1 minute read

My notes on installing, running and using MongoDB

Novid Kiosk

2 minute read

Tijdens de 2016 editie van Fri3d Camp, ontstond het idee bij de CEO van Novid om een eigen online content-management platform te laten ontwikkelen als vervan...

PIC

1 minute read

For a course on software for realtime and embedded systems I was invited to explore a PIC microcontroller. Up to that point my primary and only target had be...

Particle Photon

less than 1 minute read

For hardware prototyping work, Arduino offers a very quick path to something functionally complete. There are very nice version, like the Uno and Micro, but ...

Pokemon Christmas Lights

5 minute read

In december 2017 I joined in a Secret Santa event organised by Henk Reickaert, amongst others known for his fun making endeavours in the Koterij.

Puppet Notes

4 minute read

Puppet failed my “First 5 Minutes Test” (TM), so I feel obliged to write down what I expect from a software distribution to offer me during our first five mi...

Pyenv Notes

1 minute read

Up to now, I haven been using virtualenv for my Python development. Recently, after having run into issues now and then - which were more related to the inst...

Python Notebook

less than 1 minute read

My notes on installing, running and using Python notebooks, aka Jupyter

Python on Heroku

less than 1 minute read

My notes on installing, running and using Python on Heroku

Raven

3 minute read

While doing research for possible master thesis topics, I’m looking into the idea of wireless sensor network. At KULeuven the DISTRINET research group is spe...

Regulated Voltage Circuit

2 minute read

The wall socket in your house gives you 110 to 240V, depending on your physical location in the world. Embedded systems typically use much lower voltages. Al...

Ruby on Mac

less than 1 minute read

Although I’m not a Ruby developer, I encounter Ruby in many places as a user. This page collects some notes on using Ruby on Mac OS X.

SR Latch

2 minute read

While studying for my Digital Electronics and Processors exam I came across the SR Latch, the Set-Reset Latch. It is a sequential circuit that is capable of ...

SSL Notes

6 minute read

OpenSSL is a wonderful technology and the openssl toolset is truly a Swiss Armyknife. But I don’t use it on a daily basis and therefore I tend to forget how ...

STM32 Nucleo

less than 1 minute read

Some quick notes on my first steps with the STM32 evaluation boards…

WS2811 Notes

2 minute read

I know, I’m late to the WS2811 party. But better late than never ;-) During the Christmas period of the wonderful year 2020, we decided to make a “Happy New ...

XBee - Zigbee module

15 minute read

Zigbee is the de facto wireless communication standard in Wireless Sensor Networks these days. It’s a low-power communication stack that provides a way to cr...

XT0F Family

less than 1 minute read

After diving into the electronics world for some weeks, I felt the need/urge to create reusable components - much as I was used to in the software world. Jus...

XT0F-001 - Regulated Power

less than 1 minute read

XT0F-001 is a an implementation of the regulated power supply. Initially I provides 5V, but I intend to add support for the 3V circuit also.

XT0F-002 - Programmer

less than 1 minute read

XT0F-002 is a programmer for a 24-pin ATMEGA8 MCU. It allows you to to connect the ISP (In System Programmer) to the MCU’s SPI.

XT0F-003 - my first WSN node

5 minute read

In 2012 I was introduced to Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and it didn’t take too long before I fell in love with this (relatively) new technology. As it wil...

avrdude

4 minute read

To handle the programmer when programming e.g. my ATMEGA168, I use avrdude.

iOS App Development

1 minute read

When I started doing some real iOS app development, I had to find my way through a whole eco-system. These are my notes as I waded through Xcode, account set...