I have used E-Ink displays in projects three years ago, but from that time the technology has greatly evolved. That time displays were hard to get, expensive and difficult to use. Now things seem to change with e-ink displays available to the maker market :-). I’m able to get a 128×296 pixel e-paper display for $10! And for little more money I can have displays with black/white/red colors!
Waveshare 2.9″ Displays
The ‘All Saints Day’ (Nov 1st) is a public holiday for some parts of Switzerland. And because I’m lucky to live in that part and because it could have been one of the last days with excellent hiking conditions, I wanted to hike a trail which has been on my bucket list for a very long time: the ‘Gratwanderweg’ (ridge hike) on the Stoos.
Ridge Walk
The ARM mbed USB MSD bootloader which is used on many silicon vendor boards has a big problem: it is vulnerable to operating systems like Windows 10 which can brick your board (see “Bricking and Recovering OpenSDA Boards in Windows 8 and 10“). To recover the board, typically a JTAG/SWD programmer has to be used. I have described in articles (see links section) how to recover from that situation, including using an inofficial new bootloader which (mostly) solves the problem. The good news is that ARM (mbed) has released an official and fixed bootloader. The bad news is that this bootloader does not work on every board because of a timing issue: the bootloader mostly enters bootloader mode instated executing the application.
DAPLink in Bootloader Mode
Kinetis Design Studio by default uses an older version of EmbSysRegView. This article explains how to upgrade to the latest and greatest version 0.2.6. And how it is possible to use the latest NXP update for the 0.2.4 version:
Installed Files in Eclipse
I’m a fan of all kind of weather stations. When Daniel Eichhorn twittered about his new version using an E-Paper display module, I immediately preordered one. I decided to build a station with a custom enclosure, so here is my version of a 3D printed version, featuring magnets so it can be attached to the fridge:
E-Paper Weather Station
It is the time of the year where trees lose their leaves and mushrooms grow on the ground.
Mushrooms
The Dolomites are full of legend and fairy tales (see “The Legend and the Fairy Tale of Lago di Carezza“), and one is about King Laurin and his Rose Garden. In this day hike we visited Haniger Schwaige hut, located below the Torri del Vajolet (Vajoletttürme, 2813 m) and Croda di Re Laurino (König-Laurin-Wand, 2813 m).
View back to King Laurins Garden
Lucerne Määs
Spent too much time today in the office, leaving it late at night. It is the time of the Lucerne ‘Määs’, captured that picture with reflections on the water. Time to get home and to get some sleep….
Happy Lunaparking 🙂
More and more these very-very-high-resolution (UHD, Ultra-High-Density) notebook displays show up in my class rooms.These displays have 3100×1800 or even more pixels, making it great for watching high-resolution videos or for playing games (maybe?). But such a high-resolution makes many tools including Eclipse very hard to use, because the toolbar icons get so tiny that they are really hard to hit with a mouse cursor on Windows:
Eclipse Icons with UHD Display
Most of the time I’m using a dedicated terminal program like Termite or PuTTY to connect to a board using virtual or non-virtual COM port. Another way is to use the Eclipse built-in Terminal view: that way no extra program is needed to communicate with a real or virtual COM port to my target device:
Terminal Command Output
MCU on Eclipse 