Putting the shit together

A year has passed since I wrote anything in this blog. I would like to say it was lack of time, or even lack of motivation. That wouldn't be by far the most honest thing to say. Now that the word "honesty" popped out I'd like to say that "honesty" is one of the most precious qualities someone can have, I appreciate it a lot, and I do my best to remain honest even though it would get me in trouble. And it has gotten me in troubles in the past.
Theres an important link between honesty and courage. It takes courage to be to be honest and open, and who wants to be a pussy? not me if you ask me.

Anyway, things has been happening (life is always happening...) and I had and have to cope with them. Luckily, a lot is to be learned each day we have on this earth and I've been taking my lessons during the last 366 days, and I found that attitude towards "life stuff" makes an important difference.

I'm baking some posts (some of them left untouch for over a year) I'll be serving them in the next days.

I'm glad to be right back at it again.

A JDM Mod Serial PIC programmer with VCC control

Since I'm kind an electronics hobbyst, I've been wanting to learn how to program Microchip PIC microcontrollers for a long time. I got some experience by using the MPLAB X IDE by Microchip with other tools that simulate PICs, and since I have an intermediate C language programming level, the learning curve was kinda smooth but sloppy. But, programming real-life PICs is a little more complicated than simulating them and it is better to have a programmer for a complete programming experience. That's why I've just started a project on building my very own JDM serial PIC programmer. To that end I'm using the hackaday platform to record all the relevant information of the process. The link to the whole project is

https://hackaday.io/project/4982-a-jdm-mod-serial-pic-programmer-with-vcc-control

I hope it's useful to someone else.

Open source tools to document your software projects. Part 2: Pandoc

This is the second part of Open source tools to document your software projects if you want to read the fist part reviewing Markdown follow this link.

PANDOC

If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife.[1]

Pandoc can convert documents in markdown, reStructuredText, textile, HTML, DocBook, LaTeX, MediaWiki markup, TWiki markup, OPML, Emacs Org-Mode, Txt2Tags, Microsoft Word docx, EPUB, or Haddock markup to HTML formats ( XHTML, HTML5, and HTML slide shows using Slidy, reveal.js, Slideous, S5, or DZSlides), Word processor  (Microsoft Word docx, OpenOffice/LibreOffice ODT, OpenDocument XML), Ebooks (EPUB version 2 or 3, FictionBook2), Documentation (DocBook, GNU TexInfo, Groff man pages, Haddock markup), Page layout formats(InDesign ICML), TeX formats(LaTeX, ConTeXt, LaTeX Beamer slides), PDF (via LaTeX), and Lightweight markup formats (Markdown, reStructuredText, AsciiDoc, MediaWiki markup, DokuWiki markup, Emacs Org-Mode, Textile), among others.

Getting pandoc

For Debian users pandoc is available from the official repositories. Get it with standard software applications

$ apt-get install pandoc -y

Using pandoc[2]

If the markdown formatted text is "pandoc.md" the following commands can be tested:

Markdown to HTML:

pandoc pandoc.md -o my_parsed_html.html

Markdown to an standalone HTML

pandoc -s pandoc.md -o my_parsed_html.html

Markdown to an standalone HTML with table of contents

pandoc -s --toc pandoc.md -o my_parsed_html.html

Markdown to  Latex

pandoc -s README -o example4.tex

Latex to Markdown

pandoc -s example4.tex -o example5.text

Markdown to PDF

pandoc -s example4.tex -o example5.text

To see more examples go to [2] or read the man page of pandoc. You can download the README file[3] and parse it to any other format by invoking pandoc and see the fancy output.

References

1. from the creator of Pandoc at Pandoc webpage
2. http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/demos.html
3. http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/demo/README