The year is coming to an end, the Holiday season is approaching. In case you are looking for a nice present: I have completed my version of a sand clock: a clock writing the time into sand:
Sandclock
If you are interested to build your own version, I have documented the different steps with tips and tricks…
The good thing with failure is: it is an opportunity to learn :-).
So here is a case: For a STEM roadshow (see “MINTomat: World’s Most Complicated Bubble Gum Automata?“), we have produced in a rush an autonomous robot with a shiny printed 3D cover:
Prototyp with LED Effects
How to fascinate kids for technology? Show them that engineering is fun :-). At the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts we have created the ‘MINTomat’: a robotics system for STEM activities rewarding interaction with bubble gums:
MINTomat
Yes, pretty over engineered compared to a normal bubble gum automata, but that’s part of the fun :-).
It seems to me that not many developers use hardware trace? ARM indicates that maybe only <5% of developers are using trace. Too bad! Why are all the ARM Cortex microcontroller vendors putting a powerful hardware (and complicated!) trace engine into their devices, if only few developers are using it? Seems like a waste of silicon and an unnecessary price adder? Well, hardware trace can be a life saver: Because only with hardware trace the most complicated bugs and problems can be solved. And maybe because only the best are using it ;-).
In this article I proudly present my research how to get instruction trace out of the ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller on a NXP TWR-K64F120M board with a Segger J-Trace for ARM:
J-TRACE tracing NXP TWR-K64F Board
A new McuOnEclipse components release was long overdue, so I’m pleased to announce that a new drop is available with the following major changes:
SourceForge
Command line tools to build applications are great. But productivity goes up if I can use the standard Eclipse environment with GNU tools. This tutorial is about how to use standard and free GNU and Eclipse tools to build my FreeRTOS application for the ARM Cortex-M4 on i.MX7 🙂 :
Eclipse used to build FreeRTOS applications for M4 on i.MX7
My Toradex i.MX7Dual module comes with a preflashed Linux distribution (see “Tutorial: First Steps with NXP i.MX7 and Toradex Colibri Board“). As with any other things, Linux gets updated from time to time, and Toradex publishes new firmware. In this article I’m documenting how I can update Linux in the external FLASH on that module.
NXP i.MX7Dual Module
In my previous article (see “Tutorial: First Steps with NXP i.MX7 and Toradex Colibri Board“) I have booted the i.MX7 on a Toradex CPU module. In this post I’m showing how to run a FreeRTOS application on that board.
UART-A and UART-B Connections
Recently I have been running into the following error message in Eclipse when I started the GDB debugger:
Error in Final Launch Sequence
I’m using in several projects different variants of Raspberry Pi boards: they are great and providing a lot of processing power. However, they are not suitable for any hard realtime systems. For a different class of projects I’m currently evaluating the NXP i.MX7 processors: the cool thing with these is that they have up to two ARM Cortex-A7 running at 1 GHz, plus a Cortex-M4 running at 200 MHz. And here things get really interesting: I can run a realtime application and FreeRTOS on that M4, while running Linux on the A7 :-).
i.MX7 on Colibri with Iris Carrier Board
MCU on Eclipse 