There are several ways to chain demux IC’s to get more outputs than the ones that a single IC can get you. In these posts I’ll explore the ones I could find and use successfully. The first one has to do with the differences of inverting and non-inverting IC’s. In this video, I have 2 iC’s driving 16 LEDs. With this configuration I could drive as much ......

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In my previous post I used a lot of transistors (not very successfully, I might add) to drive 4 LEDs with 2 digital GPIO pins from a Netduino. I mentioned that there are Integrated Circuits (ICs) that may be used for that. In this post I’m going to use one of those ICs (specifically, a 74HCT138) to do the exact same thing. First, here is how it looks: ......

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WARNING: I’m probably doing something terribly wrong here. In my last post, I mentioned that using transistors you can do boolean logic. This is the fundamental basis for computers to work. I wanted to test the concept. In that article, I was using a single Netduino digital output to drive two LEDs. In this experiment, I’m using two digital outputs ......

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Be warned: this will be very basic. I find it amazing nonetheless. As a newbie, I went out and bought a 5V led to be used in an output port in the Netduino. This will of course not work, as the output ports of the Netduino are 3.3V. “No problem”, I thought, “I’ll just use some resistors”. The only problem is that resistors don’t work that way. You can ......

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I received (by chance, mostly) a Netduino last tuesday. Netduino is an open-source hardware project based on Arduino and the .Net Micro Framework. And it’s extremely cool. I’m a C# developer and I was always interested in electronics. This is an excellent tool to start to understand that incredible world. I was about to buy an Arduino when the Netduino ......

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Last week started the spectrial, a trial between some international movie, music and tv producers and The Pirate Bay. In case you've been living under a rock for the past few years, The Pirate Bay is one of the biggest torrent trackers in the world, run in Sweden by a number of people. The spectrial (so called by TPB members) was announced more than ......

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I was modifying old setups lately, by directly editing them with Orca. It’s not such a great experience, but I really didn’t want to go through Dark for such simple modifications. In the process, I found that one of the worst parts of the format is decoding the Type column in the CustomAction table. Because of that, I have coded a very simple application ......

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There’s something that we developers don’t seem to get about the users, and it’s that the file system is a quite complex beast to use. It provides order, yes, but at the expense of users getting lost on where their files are. And it gets worst, as there’s no easy way to solve this. In Windows, there’s only one key that will move your files to a well ......

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In case you didn’t know, Windows XP SP2 provides a very cool update feature. It works like this: you have a main product, and the Quick Fixes / Service Packs that are applied to it. When you repair your setup for the main product, all the updates are also applied. When you remove, the cleanup is done for all. And it also looks cool on the Add/Remove ......

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It is very common on Vista (with UAC activated) to have a setup run through with no error, but to end up not installing anything. This happens when you try to write to protected resources (such as some parts of the file system, registry, etc). It’s easy to get past this on custom actions (using impersonate=”no” and Execute=”deferred”), but finding out ......

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Custom Action type 50 has a very useful behavior. This custom action copies a value to a property. The cool thing about it is that you can copy any formatted string. That is, if you use [], you can get the value of another property. and you can also use environment variables (with a % prefix), file paths (with a # prefix) and directory paths (with a ......

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If you’ve made your own setup using Wix and Custom Actions, you probably got to the end of your setup to see the progress bar still running with an empty status message. It’s specially notorious if your action takes a long time to run. Gladly, there’s an easy solution to that. Simply open your UI.wxs (or add a <UI> tag in your Product, or in a ......

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The question from my previous post was: how do I validate a Product Key from a Wix Setup? The answer has many components. First, you have to create a dialog for your product key in Wix. This dialog should have some sort of formatted input (say, a repetition of six 4-letter groups). It should also have some sort of validation. Next, you need to have ......

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I was commissioned recently on making a Product Key system for a shrink wrap piece of software. And my first thought was: there must be some sort of best practice or pattern language for this. I mean, many people sell shrink wrap software every day, and inventing the procedure each time is just to costly and error probe. Turns out, I was wrong. There ......

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3 years ago, I wrote this post: http://regexlib.com/REDetai... It contained a .Net regular expression that would match the highest level of matching braces, something that is needed more often than not when parsing languages. It will also return null if no matching braces are found. Finally, as an added bonus, it will ignore braces ......

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