It it is obvious that a new trend from the US is swapping over to Europe and probably the rest of the world: Black Friday. That is the day yesterday following Thanksgiving day in the United States. It is a ‘shopping’ day. Consequently, the stores are battling with huge discounts. And I use that to fill up my inventory for the Christmas-time projects 🙂 What caught my attention yesterday Friday was this: a Raspberry Pi Zero for US$5!!!!
Raspberry Pi Zero (Picture: Adafruit)
It’s not Christmas yet, but: For a research project I’m currently evaluating a new microcontroller where I need a bit more leg room. Right on time I saw that there is a new board available which caught my interest: The Freescale FRDM-K82F :-). Without thinking too much about it, I have ordered that board from Mouser Thursday last week and I had it in my hand today 🙂 Time to put up a quick post about it:
New Box on the table
In case there are problems with the C/C++ preprocessor, it is useful to generate the compiler preprocessor listing. Here is how to create a preprocessor listing with GNU gcc compiler and the GNU ARM Eclipse plugins in Eclipse:
Preprocessor Listing in Eclipse
A lot of good things happened in the last three weeks, so here is a new updated McuOnEclipse component release, with the following main improvements:
First off: The tinyK20 project is progressing fine and is now on Hackaday.io :-).
For a research project we would like to use the tinyK20 to log gyro sensor data. For this I have created a quick-n-dirty project to explore how feasible it is. The tinyK20 has all the pins on the outside of the board, so I’m able to put it on a bread board:
tinyK20 on Breadboard
Readers of my blog know: I’m not a fan of printf(), and I think for many good reasons. Still printf() is widely used, and the GNU gcc tries to optimize things. This is observed with a simple example: If I’m writing
printf("a");
Then the code produced (ARM Cortex-M0+ with GNU ARM Embedded 4.9 2015q2 gives:
movs r0, #97 ; 0x61 bl 0xa98
Instead of calling printf(), it is calling putchar()! Why is that?
PutChar instead of Printf
One day earlier than expected, our tinyK20 boards arrived, and they are looking great :-):
Four tinyK20 Boards
One of the most important aspects for developing complex realtime applications is get insights into what is going on the target. Segger just has released a free tool which gives an incredible useful insight view and visualization:
Segger System View for FreeRTOS
Good news for all the Eclipse and ARM lovers: Atollic have announced this week at ARM TechCon 2015 in Santa Clara that their TrueSTUDIO ‘Lite’ is now free of charge with unlimited code size. 🙂
atollic TrueSTUDIO
Over the weekend, I finally have repaired the broken ESC (see “Kinetis Drone: Graupner ESC S3055 Failure“). Time to run some first test flights :-).
Kinetis Drone Flying Tests
MCU on Eclipse 