Finally, winter with lots of snow arrived in Switzerland. Getting up at 5am this morning to free up my front yard from the 25 cm snow which came down overnight, so I can drive my wife to work. She does not like driving in snow conditions, but it is fun for me :-). But lots of snow, I thought I could use a little helper bot:
Snow Plowing Sumo Bot
The FRDM-K22F is one of the latest members of the Freedom board families: 512 KByte Flash, 128 KB RAM and the usual Freedom board components on it. Unfortunately, Freescale decided not to populate the micro-SD card connector on the board, so from this perspective the FRDM-K64F is more value for the money. But the board has USB, so this makes it still interesting. And this is what this post is about: Adding USB to the FRDM-K22F board in a few minutes…
Freescale FRDM-K22F Board
As I have received multiple questions about that Darth Vader Santa Claus/Christmas robot in the Mini-Sumo competition last week, here are the details in case you want to build your own :-)…
Darth Vader Sumo Bot
Here are the videos and results of the Mini-Sumo competition held on 19-Dec-2014 in Horw, Switzerland:
See “Infotronic WS2014 Sumo Robots are Ready!” for all the robot portraits.
Watching a Sumo Battle
In my earlier post “Tutorial: Web Server with the ESP8266 WiFi Module” I used the ESP8266 WiFi module to run a local web server. This is a cool way to control devices inside my network. But to use that web page from the internet, I would need to open up my router which I don’t want to do for obvious reasons. Why not going the other way: host the web page in the internet, and have my board communicating with that internet page? This is exactly what this hype around IoT (Internet of Things) is all about :-).
ThingSpeak Channel for ESP8266
It has been a while since my first post about the ESP8266 (see “Cheap and Simple WiFi with ESP8266 for the FRDM Board“). The ESP8266 is a new inexpensive ($4.50) WiFi module which makes it easy to connect to the network or internet. Finally this week-end I have found the time to write up a tutorial:
how to implement a WiFi web server for the ESP8266 WiFi module and the Freescale FRDM-KL25Z board:
WSP8266 Web Server
FRDM-KL25Z with ESP8266 WiFi Module
I want to make some noise with this post!!! This tutorial is about adding music and sound capabilities to the Freescale Freedom board, and to have a lot of fun with it :-). I need this ability for a larger project working on for a while. But I thought I share that sub-part how to play sound files. So with this tutorial I can turn my Freescale Freedom board into a music or sound player :-). And adding sounds is a cool way for any project, and as the music is stored on an SD card it fits easily hours of music or sounds.
MP3 Player with FRDM-KL25Z and Adafruit Music Maker MP3 Shield
I have several applications where I store application specific information in the microcontroller FLASH memory (see “Configuration Data: Using the Internal FLASH instead of an external EEPROM“). I have run into issues recently with the Segger J-Link GDB server as by default it does *not* erase all the FLASH memory. So the question is: How can I erase all (or part) of the FLASH memory with GDB (e.g. in Kinetis Design Studio or in Eclipse)?
Memory Monitor with Erased Flash
For me as an Eclipse and Processor Expert lover, a press release that Atollic supports Processor Expert catched my eye :-). So there is yet another way to use Processor Expert: with a commercial Eclipse IDE provided by Atollic (atollic.com/).
Atollic Splash Screen
Time to check it out…
The Freescale FRDM-K64F and FRDM-K22F have a different OpenSDA (v2) firmware on it: unlike the earlier (v1), that firmware is open and not protected which is a great thing. However, it has the disadvantage if you use the wrong SWD/JTAG header on your board, the bootloader on the K20 OpenSDA microcontroller is gone 😦
Two SWD Headers on FRDM-K64F Board
MCU on Eclipse 