Having recently buying an analog to digital converter and a prototype adaptor board for an SOIC, I decided to use my reflow tool I bought a few month back. One thing I didn't take into account was that my solder paste was out of date in November 2011, making it fairly thick and hard to separate.

Also it turns out the display on my reflow tool is in Fahrenheit, not Celsius.

I think it turned out rather well for my first one.

The second one however, a digital to analog converter, turned out far worse of a job. It is a TSSOP package - a fraction the size of the SOIC, and I have trouble with bridges being formed between pins, and my cheap solder wick was failing to remove them.

I'm unsure if the chips still work, as I took quite a while to get them in the correct position, but I was 40-60 degrees lower than the maximum soldering temperature. Hopefully I will have time to test them tomorrow.

TSSOP16 Adaptor

SOIC16 Adaptor

I suppose being a company of 2700+, ideas are hard to come by.

[article link]

Well apparently the same online scam artists have thought it was a great idea, and are now selling plans for a zero point energy device.

If you want to read the trash they've wrote this time, a Google of the Hojo Motor will surely bring it up. It is only a matter of time now before they start selling off pieces of dinosaur DNA claiming that you too can grow your own Jurassic Park, and Zoo Keepers don't want you to know about this.

More similar code is on the official IO CCC website.

http://www.ioccc.org/

http://www.ioccc.org/years.html#2001_herrmann2

So I decided to make SprintfCat(), all the wonderful joy of sprintf, with the ability to concatenate with a already existant string like strcat.

Source code

//
//
size_t ath::SprintfCat( char * inoutBuffer, const size_t inBufferSize, const char * inFormat, ... )
{
	const size_t offset = StrLen( inoutBuffer );
	size_t ret = 0;
	va_list arg;
 
	//
	va_start( arg, inFormat );
	{
		ret = VSprintf( inoutBuffer + offset, inBufferSize - offset, inFormat, arg );
	}
	va_end( arg );
 
	//
	return offset + ret;
}

I had already created my own wrappers around strlen() and vsprintf(), the reason being the fault of Microsoft. With their implementation of the standard library, they decided to deprecate non-safe versions complain at you until you either used their own _s variants, or defined a certain preprocessor.

Source code

//
//
size_t ath::VSprintf( char * outBuffer, const size_t inBufferSize, const char * inFormat, va_list inArgs )
{
#ifndef ATH_PLATFORM_WINDOWS
	return vsnprintf( outBuffer, inBufferSize, inFormat, inArgs );
#else
	return vsprintf_s( outBuffer, inBufferSize, inFormat, inArgs );
#endif
}
 
//
//
size_t ath::StrLen( const char * inString )
{
	return strlen( inString );
}

While I do prefer to have safe versions, their _s variants are not present in the standard and so it makes the code not portable.

I'm still not quite sure about my naming convention for a variable that is an input and an output. While I do like the in or out prefix, I don't think inout looks right, being slightly too long. I wasn't a fan of io either. I have however grown to like the truncation of Athena namespace to ath.

So I made a function that will take the sources list and output the lines with line numbers.

Source code

void OutputWithLineNumbers( const char ** inSources, const unsigned int inCount )
{
	bool unendedLineNo = false;
	int lineNumber = 1;
 
	for( unsigned int i = 0; i < inCount; ++i )
	{
		const char * cur = inSources[i];
		const char * next = NULL;
 
		do
		{
			//
			if( !unendedLineNo )
			{
				printf( "%04d: ", lineNumber );
			}
 
			//
			next = strchr( cur, '\r' );
 
			//
			if( next )
			{
				size_t len = ( next - cur );
				char * lineText = (char *)alloca( len );
				memcpy( lineText, cur, len );
				lineText[len] = 0;
 
				printf( "%s\n", lineText );
 
				unendedLineNo = false;
				++lineNumber;
			}
			else
			{
				printf( "%s", cur );
				unendedLineNo = true;
			}
 
			//
			cur = next + 2;
		} while( next );
	}
 
	if( unendedLineNo )
	{
		printf( "\n" );
	}
}

This code requires the source files to have a carriage return as well as a new line character.

1000 Heroz HD

For a "HD" game, the graphics are really crap on the iPad 2. And no antialiasing, shame on you RedLynx.

So I took at look into Build Rules in XCode. My main trouble within using them was finding the environment variables, even googling them doesn't turn up much information.

I think the output files act as an error check, if the output file fails to appear then the tool failed.

One other thing I had an issue with was the source files list. I tried comma and semi colon delimiters, and spaces, but the TGA file kept giving the warning on Tree1.tga. I have yet t0 find the a way to do this without multiple entries. And I'm thinking a separate tool for building files may be easier.

After creating another app and still haven't the same problem, I was about to report it as a bug when the answer dawned on me, I had the orientation lock on.

It would be nice if you could do it on an application basis as well as a global one, since I only turn it on because photos get orientated incorrectly.

The contents of my "Useless" app folder: Stocks, Weather, Contacts, Calculator, Voice Memos, Compass, Reminders. If only you could turn off the default apps as well.

On another note, I've added a page next to website for iOS specific links.