Thanks to Francisco, the spanish version of the book Programming the Z80 by Rodnay Zaks is available in PDF.

You can download it here.

PS: The book was found in public Internet forums. The author of this blog takes no responsability for the information contained in this book and the way it is used.

These latest days I have been digging on the creation of WordPress templates or themes. To learn more I wanted to create one, and what best to practice than creating a new theme for my own Web page based on WordPress.

I hope everyone of my readers to enjoy this new fresh air in the site.

Finally, the FAT32 Driver written in C/C++ for the CCS compiler is available.

The code was written for the PIC18F2550 microcontroller but it could be easily adapted for other microcontrollers.

With some aditional work, it could even be adapted to work with Atmel AVR microcontrollers using WinAVR.

The project can be downloaded from the project’s page clicking here.

Many times when working with some systems like microcontrollers, accessing a hard drive or SD/MMC card formatted with FAT32 is needed.

FAT32 is a file system created by Microsoft present in almost every computer and operating system.

For this reason, it is very useful when doing some projects to have some driver for this file system capable of read and write files.

In the Projects section, I’ve published a FAT32 driver created by me, written in C# for the handling of directories and files.

Also, soon you will find the same code written in C/C++ that could be used in other platforms like PIC microcontrollers, Atmel AVR, etc.

Go to the project page clicking here.

After many days down, finally the web site is back online again. I hope to post some new projects I’ve been working on, as soon as possible.

Continuing with the development of some applications using the 32feet.NET bluetooth communication library, I’ve created this tiny application capable of send and receive hand-drawings made by someone else. For example, you can transfer some information with a coleague in a meeting, or to a friend in a classroom, etc.

The program supports various pen widths and colors. Excelent for sending short messages and/or drawings.

The full application, as well as other test programs, can be downloaded from here.

That’s the name of my latest C# application for Pocket PC. Some days ago, the concern of creating a Windows Mobile application capable of communicate using bluetooth came up and after some research, I found an excelent library at Codeplex called 32feet.NET created by In The Hand. This library encapsulates the Windows bluetooth interfaces in both Windows versions, for desktops and mobile devices.

The BTChat application, is a simple prototype of a bluetooth capable application and has been created encapsulating the classes provided in the library mentioned before even more.

The program also support the “server” option, that is, it can repeat the received messages to all the clients added to a list.

If you want to try this application or modify to adjust it to your needs, you can do it downloading the source code from here: BTChat v1.1

Also, a desktop application is also available with same functionalities as the Pocket PC version. Remember that this program only works with the Microsoft bluetooth stack, otherwise an error will occur.

Lately, I have got some free time in which to play one of my favorites card games. I’m talking about UNO.

Some time ago, I searched for a UNO game for my Pocket PC with no luck until a few weeks ago that I found Pocket UNO created by Denis Solonenko. It’s a really fun game and it’s available in many languages like Esperanto, English, Russian, French and lately in Spanish.

This game is a “must have” and I’m sure it will provide you hours of entertainment.

Finally I have finished the upload process of the MP3 player demostration video. As you can see, everything is working as it should. At least, that’s what I think. I hope you to enjoy this video and don’t forget that the Name Contest is still alive, so let’s propose some names!!!

If you want to watch the video in higher quality visit this link and click on “watch in high quality” that appears below the video box.

Some time ago, I had into my hands an article about steganography. According to Wikipedia:

Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one apart from the sender and intended recipient even realizes there is a hidden message.

The article was about the implementation of a program capable of saving data inside common used files like images, music files, etc.

I found the idea particularly interesting, and I decided to make my own C# implementation of such a program able to safely save any file inside an image (because audio files are harder to implement). There are just two limitations: the first one is that the maximum size of the file to hide is proportional to the image size in pixels, and the second one is that the resulting image has to be in PNG format.

As a general rule, for every 8 pixels, you can save 1 byte. That is, if you have a 640×480 pixels image then you have about 307,200 pixels in which you can save 38,400 bytes of information.

The program and the source code can be downloaded from here: Steganography Test

NOTE: If you want to view a demo of the provided application, you can try decoding the PNG image of this post, and see what happens… Oh! I forgot… the password is www.andyolivares.com