Sometimes it makes sense to write everything in assembly, even these days. For example if using a tiny microcontroller. Or just if one just don’t need all the productivity of the C/C++ tools. And it is a good educational experience: getting hands-on on the lower levels.
A Triumvirate is or Triarchy is built by three individuals which lead or rule something. In this article I want to rule a project with Eclipse CDT, Visual Studio Code and with building it from the command line for automated builds.
So what if I have an Eclipse project (say MCUXpresso IDE and SDK), and want to build it on a build server, and and I want to use the same time the project with Eclipse IDE and Visual Studio code?
Key to this is CMake: I’m keeping the Eclipse CDT features, adding CMake with Make and Ninja to the fix, and have it ‘ruled’ by three different ’emperor’: Eclipse, Visual Studio Code and from a shell console:
I love the WS2812B (aka SK6812) addressable LEDs: they are inexpensive and available in different packages. I have used them in different projects, including the MetaClockClock one. I used the NXP Kinetis for these projects, but because they are not available any more, for a new project we had to choose a new microcontroller, with the Raspberry Pi Pico RP2040 as the winner.
When something goes wrong in an embedded system, a watchdog timer is the last line of defense against a blocked or malfunctioning system. A watchdog is a special timer which needs to be ‘kicked’ in a special way, otherwise the timer will run out and reset the system.
For example, a watchdog is an important safety feature in the E-Vehicle charging controller with Raspberry Pi Pico-W RP2040:
The Raspberry Pi Pico RP2040 is a very versatile microcontroller. It is not the least expensive or the most powerful microcontroller, but it is one which is available and has an excellent software and tool ecosystem.
This article shows how to use the Raspberry Pi Pico-W with BLE and optional WiFi, running with FreeRTOS.
Most embedded developers have probably used ‘semihosting’. And yes, it is generally seen as a bad thing. Maybe you have used it, without realizing what it really is and what it does. It is simple to add a printf() to the code (again: you should not use printf), and with the right standard library, it magically it shows up in a console view:
That looks great, but what is behind this, to make it happen? Actually, it is really amazing technology. And it can be used for better things than just printing text.
Continue readingOn my host machine I have many different development environment installed. From different make, cmake and python versions up to different versions of GNU tool chains. Adding them to the PATH environment variable on Windows is really a bad thing: instead I want to keep my PATH as clean as possible. If I need to set up a different environment with different tools, then I prefer to have a ‘local’ environment.
One of the biggest fears of embedded systems developers are stack overflows. FreeRTOS includes a cool feature to monitor and catch task stack overflows. But what about the MSP (Main Stack Pointer) on ARM, or the interrupt stack? What if not using an RTOS and running a bare-metal application?
There is a simple way monitoring stack usage at runtime, and for this I want to share the routines and what is now available inside the McuArm module.
Continue readingEvery embedded system developer should know by now, that using printf() is not a good thing for smaller systems. Printf() and the like are not only problematic from a code and data size perspective, they are infamous for vulnerability attacks too.
In this article I’ll show you multiple ways how to ban printf() or anything similar you want to avoid.
Continue readingI’m in the final stage of finishing a electrical vehicle (EV) charger controller, which optimizes battery loading using the available PV system: use as much as possible the solar energy and not the grid.
While the controller talks with an Modbus (RS-485) interface to the vehicle charger itself (see Controlling an EV Charger with Modbus RTU), it uses MQTT over WiFi to get information about the available solar energy from HomeAssistant and the Powerwall.
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MCU on Eclipse 