• Updates to the UART and RS-232 communication protocol pages.

• New Cross Product page under Mathematics->Geometry.

• Updated the Fixed Point Mathematics page with more information of multiplication, division and modulo.

• NinjaCalc got a new ‘Two Coordinate Geodesics’ calculator. This has it’s own post here.

• Added information on “unused parameter” compiler warnings to the Qt page.

# Geodesic Calculator Added To NinjaCalc

NinjaCalc has a new calculator, a “Two Coordinate Geodesics” calculator that can help you analyse properties of two coordinates/points on the earth’s surface (defined by latitude/longitude).

Given two points in latitude/longitude form (both degrees and radians supported), the calculator can give you the great circle (shortest) distance between the two points, and the initial/final bearings. This calculator can also find an intermediate coordinate/point between the two coordinates, given a fractional amount (such as 0.5). All of these properties are calculated using the Haversine formula.

All these properties are shown on a interactive model of the earth in 3D (the sphere can be rotated).

This calculator can be found in the NinjaCalc web app at http://ninja-calc.mbedded.ninja/.

• Updated the C Data Types page with information on software-based floating point arithmetic.

• New apt page under Programming->Operating Systems->Linux->Programs.

• New Anaconda page under Programming->Languages->Python.

• Updated the C++ Exceptions page with information on the noexcept keyword introduced in C++11.

# Happy New Year 2018

Happy new year for 2018!

Here are some statistics for 2017:

 Num. views 111k (down 40% from last year) Visitors 64k (down 35% from last year) Num. Of New Pages 90 (up 30% from last year)

Most Popular Pages:

 Altium Tricks And Standards 12.8k Altium Bugs And Things To Watch Out For 7.0k Home Page 3.4k Component Packages 3.0k A Function Pointer Based State Machine 2.8k

Most Popular Referrers:

 Search Engines 64.4k Wikipedia.org 1k cypress.com 257 Reddit 235 android-app 193

And here are the visitors in 2017 by country:

I think the biggest reason for the drop in visits (down 40%) in 2017 was due to the moving of www.mbedded.ninja to blog.mbedded.ninja. Even though www.mbedded.ninja was then setup to redirect to the new URL (you can click the above links if you don't believe me!), a significant drop in traffic was seen from this point onwards (I'm not that savvy on the details of SEO, but I guess it hurt the site's reputation). You can see the drop in the image below:

The total number of visits (ever) is now at 730k. Bring on 1 million!

Some things I would like the improve on the blog in 2018:

• Move more and more images away from using image plugins, and instead use the default media handler.
• Add more child page sections to pages, and make sure each child page has both an image and a intelligible description.
• Boost visitor count back up to it's former levels (or better!) by improving content and SEO.
• Fully retire the use of the QuickLatex plugin, using MathJax-Latex plugin for latex rendering instead.