Play a Sound at the End of the Build with Eclipse

Using Post-Build feature in Eclipse is a great way to augment a build with all kind of actions. What if the build takes a long time and you want to get notified? One way is to play a sound at the end of the build process.

Post-Build Step with a Sound Action
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Building and Flashing ESP32 Applications with Eclipse

The new semester is approaching in a very fast way, and so is the new lecture and lab module ‘Advanced Distributed Systems’ at the Lucerne University. For that module we are going to build a new ‘Sumo’ style robot with WLAN capabilities using the ESP32 chip. It will be a new robot PCB, and below is the current robot (based on NXP K22FX512) with the WLAN module connected to it:

Zumo connected to TTGO ESP32 module

Zumo connected to TTGO ESP32 module

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Simple Trick to Move a Lost Off-Screen Application Back on Windows

I love working with multi-monitor systems (see “Go, multiply and detach: Multiple Screens with Eclipse“), as this extends my working area. So I decided a while back to install a multi-monitor system on my home desktop too, as this is such a productivity boost.

multi monitor desktop

multi monitor desktop

But with moving the laptop machine between the display configurations, it happens that an application opens ‘off-screen’, and there is no way to ‘grab’ it with the mouse 😦

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Removing Hidden COM & LPT Ports and Devices on Windows

These days machines do not have physical serial (COM) ports any more. I do not understand why the USB group had missed to define a clean serial communication standard :-(. And the same mistake gets repeated for BLE again 😦 :-(. So every vendor and provider has its own USB CDC driver and interface. And it is really a big pain of the virtual COM/USB CDC ports installed. I have seen countless cases where “the USB UART or CDC port does not work”. So if you have such a problem, I might have a tip for you: Show hidden devices in the Windows Device manager. But in a special way I had not thought about it!

Where are the hidden devices

Where are the hidden devices?

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