This post is the kind of round about post you get first thing in the morning. Ill get to the title question at the end. This morning, I was interested in doing a tiny bit of tinkering. I had found one of these 4 digit 7 segment LED displays while digging around for something else. You can get these modules for about 2. Bay. A little over a week ago, I was tinkering with a We. MOS D1 Mini board that I had acquired, and decided to port my Plan 1. Long long long time readers may remember some years ago that I wrote this code to predict the position of satellites, first in Python, but then ported it to C and had it running on the Arduino as part of my ANGST Arduino n Gameduino Satellite Tracker project. But that project had a number of shortcomings It was fairly complicated, and required a number of additional add ons to work. I used the Gameduino to generate graphics, had an external RTC and EEPROM to store orbital data, and used an optical shaft encoder to move around. Website dedicated to Wireless LAN Security and Wardriving. Includes lots of whitepapers, presentations, tools, firmware, drivers, equipment, and resources. Brainwagon There is much pleasure in useless knowledge. Bertrand Russell. VzuQHMKvMGsS91YrP7LVA' alt='Wifi Cracking Fpga' title='Wifi Cracking Fpga' />Yes, it was attractive and fun, but not cost effective. It had no easy way to update orbital elements. You had to connect it to a PC and reprogram it with new orbital elements each time you needed an update. But these We. MOS boards are built around the ESP8. They are based around an 8. Mhz 3. 2 bit processor, instead of a 1. Mhz 8 bit processor. They have 4. Mbytes of flash memory. You can easily configure some small part of that to serve as a miniature file system, ample to store orbital elements without any additional hardware. They are cheap around 5. And most intriguingly they have Wi. Fi.  So, I worked on the spiritual descendent of ANGST. Using the platformio system I moved a copy of my Plan. FleaFPGA_Uno.jpg' alt='Wifi Cracking Fpga' title='Wifi Cracking Fpga' />As of now, the project Wakes up and connects to my local Wi. Fi network. Establishes a connection to an NTP server, so I can get the time. Connects to Celestrak and downloads the latest orbital elements for the ISSPredicts the next three passes from my home location. And then enters a loop, predicting the sub satellite latitude and longitude, its location relative to some major world cities, and if it is above the horizon, then the azimuth and altitude of the satellite. Here is the current data as I write this But the one thing it did not have until this morning was an external display. Hence, the TM1. 63. Time is in GMT, but eventually I will also have it have the option of using local time it is more convenient to use GMT for the satellite computations. To get this to work, I could have dusted off the work to drive the similar TM1. I used in another project, but I thought that Id use a standard library instead. The platformio system has a pretty nifty library manager, so I searched for a library, found one cool and it claimed compatibility with the ESP8. Lego Nxt Balancing Robot Program there. Neat. So I read some of the example code, patched it to output the time in the main loop, and tried it. It didnt work. I double checked connections. Not at all. Just means disabling any sort of hardware encryption and using application based encryption instead. This works for homewifi as well. TheINQUIRER publishes daily news, reviews on the latest gadgets and devices, and INQdepth articles for tech buffs and hobbyists. Bitcoin. La bolla dei bitcoin ed il sonno dei regulatorsBitcoin da 10 a 11mila dollari in poche ore. Poi cala a 9500. bolla ClaimBitcoin is the Bitcoin generator that everyone has been waiting for. Currently it is the only working Bitcoin generator out there, and at the moment it can. BHb69s9RUUY/Ur7J1TzmaoI/AAAAAAAAAYg/D8CzyOKLJsA/s1600/How+to+use+Aircrack-ng+1.2+to+crack+WPA..png' alt='Wifi Cracking Fpga' title='Wifi Cracking Fpga' />It didnt work. I tried their example. It didnt work.  The displays remained dark. Grumble.  I opened up the code and tried to see what was going on. It didnt take me too long to figure out what was going on Here is a link to the code, and a screen grab of the offending lines Link to the source on github. Its not exactly my first rodeo, so I was immediately suspicious when I saw that the initializer set the mode for the two pins to INPUT, rather than OUTPUT, but then immediately wrote to them. That doesnt seem right, does it Well, this isnt even my second rodeo. I know that Arduinos ATMega. Ive seen odd code which used pin. Mode to swap back and forth between high and low, not using pin. Mode. But the ESP8. I doesnt have internal pull ups. Im pretty sure thats true, but I never got to verify it, because all of a sudden, with no change whatsoever, my program started working. I hate it when that happens. Its been that kind of a week. But it made me think about how this works. Here is my guess, and Id appreciate corrections. During initialization, it sets pin. Mode to INPUT, and writes a LOW value to the data pin. Even though weve written a LOW, the pin is pulled HIGH by the action of the external pull up resistor. When the driver wishes to shift the output pin to LOW, it uses pin. Mode to shift the type for the pin to OUTPUT. When it wants it to be high, it sets pin. Mode to INPUT. I find this odd in a couple of ways It is not any shorter or more efficient than using digital. Write. It is certainly no clearer. Is there something Im missing about why you would code this stuff this way Of course, I wouldnt have dug into this code at all had I not had a mysterious and fleeting failure at the beginning, so I am not sure how it really matters. Addendum  While I was typing this, the ISS did a 6. I only then noticed that it was producing duplicate messages for each five second message. Must have goofed when I installed the code to blink the clocks colon segments. Ill get it sorted later.