Just nearby where I live I have a mountain peak with a beautiful panorama view. So I’ll take you on virtual tour with high-resolution pictures to the Rigi Hochflue (1998 m).
The tour starts from the Gätterli summit (1699 m) in the morning:
Start in Gätterli: view to the South
With the NXP Pins Tool (see “Tutorial: Muxing with the New NXP Pins Tool“) I can configure and mux (multiplex) the microcontroller pins. What is really powerful and what might not be so obvious at the first sight is that it gives me deep control over every register bit and setting. For example I have below the PTB1 (Port B, pin 1) muxed as GPIO (General Purpose I/O):
PTB1 Muxed with Pins Tool
But it only generates this:
void BOARD_InitPins(void) {
CLOCK_EnableClock(kCLOCK_PortB); /* Port B Clock Gate Control: Clock enabled */
PORT_SetPinMux(PORTB, PIN1_IDX, kPORT_MuxAsGpio); /* PORTB1 (pin 54) is configured as PTB1 */
}
So what about all the other bits and pieces? Continue reading
With the beautiful Alps just outside the door step, I hiked up to the Rigi Hochflue on Sunday, so I can share pictures of alpine flowers at 1698 m (click to enlarge):
Smartwatches are around for a while now. To me it is still questionable how useful the ‘big’ ones for iOS and Android are. But there are definitely the crowd funded smartwatch projects which caught my attention. Maybe it is about the ‘do-anything’ with connectivity? One of these gadgets is Hexiwear: a hackable open source device
Hexiwear Device
While it *could* be a kind of smartwatch, the value of this thing is more that it includes a plethora of sensors with two microcontroller, and I can use Eclipse with GNU tools to build my firmware :-).
Alert: Hackster.io is giving away 100 Hexiwears, but you need to hurry up (submission until July 15th 2016)!
Breakout boards are great: they allow me to explore functions quickly, without to build my custom board: all what I need is some wires and ideally a bread board.
Adadfruit MicroSD Card Breakout Board
NXP has released their Kernel Awareness for FreeRTOS in Eclipse (Kinetis Design Studio):
Having a total of 14 guests in the evening, why not preparing a great BBQ? A smoker can take a lot of meat, so for this I decided to smoke two kinds of Baby Back Ribs plus one pork shoulder for pulled pork. Everyone is helping with preparing desert plus the salad dishes:
Salad bar
My job was to get up early to deal with the fire and meat 🙂
Today it has been a mostly rainy day, except in the morning there was a small window with sunshine and no rain. Amazing to watch the bumblebees, bees and wild bees are taking advantage of that opportunity.
Bee on Lavender
Sometimes things don’t go well, especially with bringing up a new board design. I always sweat blood that first minute when I try to connect with the debugger to a new design: Will it work? After the optical inspection, performing electrical tests (no shortcuts? voltage levels ok?) the inflection point is when I’m connecting the first time with the debugger to the new board: either it will properly connect and program the device (hurrah!) or it will fail and potentially difficult hours of investigations have to follow.
First PCB under Debug
More and more of my students are using Microsoft Windows 10 machines, and my computer has been upgraded to Windows 10 a couple of week ago too. From my work and experience, a new operating system causes always some challenges, and Windows 10 is no difference. And no, this is not about Microsoft vs. Apple vs. Linux, this post is about addressing a potential and painful problem which I have observed with Windows 10 machines, and to my understanding it could happen with any other operating system too. The problem is that somehow on several student machines the bootloader and OpenSDA application on their FRDM boards did not work any more.
FRDM-K64F (top) programming the OpenSDA Bootloader (bottom)
MCU on Eclipse 