quick tips - Shawn Hymel

September 16, 2015March 27, 2016Tutorial61 Comments

Quick Tip: HTTP GET with the ESP8266 Thing

The SparkFun ESP8266 “Thing” is one of the cheapest Internet of Things (IoT) platforms available.

There are some great examples on how to post data to data.sparkfun.com, but we need to modify that code in order to pull data from a website. That is accomplished with the humble HTTP GET request. I put together a quick example that pulls www.example.com and prints it to the serial console. Note that you will need perform some slight modifications to the board (or use Realterm) to see the serial data.

January 22, 2015March 27, 2016Tutorial15 Comments

Quick Tip: Reading Fuse Bits in an Arduino

If you are playing around with avrdude and fuses in an Arduino, you might run into an error like:

avrdude: safemode: lfuse reads as 0
avrdude: safemode: hfuse reads as 0
avrdude: safemode: efuse reads as 0

This is because the Arduino bootloader cannot access fuses in the ATmega. To fix this, we can use another Arduino as an in-system programmer (ISP).

December 9, 2014June 10, 2016Tutorial20 Comments

Quick Tip: Changing Default Directory of Git Bash

I don’t know why this gave me so much trouble, but it did. When I installed Git for Windows, the default, Bash-like Windows terminal for git, it insisted that its home directory was /s (nowhere near my Documents folder in windows).

Here is a quick tip to make Git Bash change its home directory automatically (so you don’t have to cd /blah/blah/blah every time you open it).

Tag: quick tips