Mountain areas can be full of danger. Documented by two impressive videos about a rockfall from the Mel de la Niva, near Evolène in the Canton of Valais, Switzerland last week. The area has been under surveillance for a while.
Evolène rockfall
Autumn Leaf Color
The manufacturing of 200 tinyK20 board is progress, and I’m sharing pictures of it :-).
Rendering from CAD Tool, top side:
Top side with gold plating and mask
In “Overview: From Snippets to Code Generation” I discussed several tools used in my development process. On tool which helps me a lot to get things done is Processor Expert. In this post I’ll give an overview about this tool and reasoning for the pros and cons of using it.
Processor Expert
On SourceForge I have published an update of the McuOnEclipse software components, with following major changes:
McuOnEclipse SourceForge Release 2015-10-17
Mastering interrupts is critical to make an embedded application reentrant. The challenge with reentrancy is that things might be implemented in a wrong way and the issue might just show up sporadically (see “EnterCritical() and ExitCritical(): Why Things are Failing Badly“). The ARM Cortex interrupt controller is named NVIC (Nested Vectored Interrupt Controller).
ARM Cortex NVIC Registers
How about to use the Freescale FRDM-KL43Z board (see “Unboxing the Freescale FRDM-KL43Z Board“) to play a Tetris game?
While developing my driver for the Electronic Speed Controllers (ESC’s) for my quadrocopter (see “Kinetis Drone: Driving the Electronic Speed Controllers“), I noticed a some strange smell, followed by a failure of one motor ESC 😦
Quadrocopter ESCs
I won’t be able to attend the Maker Faire in Rome (16. – 18. Oct. 2015). But five of the Sumo bots students from the previous semesters have built and programmed will be there.
Sumo Robots
Flying a quadrocopter without some sensor and microcontroller intelligence will be a challenge. Definitely I will need some intelligent sensor data to help me out :-). Luckily, there is a Freescale ‘Sensor Fusion Toolbox’ and Library which gives me a nice start and visibility into the sensors I plan to use:
Sensor Fusion Data
MCU on Eclipse 