Split-flap displays are electromechanical display devices, which were common in airports or railway stations a few years ago.Unfortunately, most of them are gone and replaced by LED displays. Why not create a DIY version of it?
I’m pleased to announce a new release of the McuOnEclipse components, available on SourceForge. This release includes several bug fixes, support for more devices, and updated components like FreeRTOS, MinINI, Percepio Tracealyzer and SEGGER SystemView.
SourceForge
I always have been fascinated by electromechanical stuff like these Flip-Dot Displays.
I had a few of PCBs left over from the V3 MetaClockClock, and originally I planned to finish a build with them by the end of 2020. But as always: things took a bit longer than expected, so I finally finished it today on the first day of the year 2021.
The build uses the same hardware as in the previous V3, but instead of an ‘artistic’ canvas background I decided for a more natural and wood design:
V4 with Walnut Veneer
‘Dark’ or ‘Black’ themes are on vogue: some love it, some do not care. The good thing is that we all have a choice. Things are getting improved on the host OS (Windows/Linux) side, but the challenge is still on the application side, but things are getting better. This is true for the Eclipse based IDEs too, with the NXP MCUXpresso IDE V11.2.1 just recently released: it comes with improved Dark Theme support:
Tweaked MCUXpresso IDE Dark Theme
I have continued to explore my two hobbies (embedded systems, and Talking About The Weather) during these weeks of lock-down. I have finally got to the point that my Weather Station project can sit on the window shelf of my office, and show me the temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure on the attached eInk display.
In this blog I’m going to focus on driving that display.
Continue readingThe NXP LPC55S69-EVK is a versatile board. In this article I show how it can be used with Adafruit TFT LCD boards, both with resistive and capacitive touch. For the software I’m using the open source LittlevGL GUI.
LPC55S69-EVK with Adafruit Touch LCD
Having access to a laser cutter makes it possible to design custom enclosures. This one is for a Raspberry Pi in a Steampunk design:
Steampunk Enclosure
There are different ways to ruin a Linux system. For the Raspberry Pi which uses a micro SD card as the storage device by default, it comes with two challenges:
For problem one I do I have a mitigation strategy (see “Log2Ram: Extending SD Card Lifetime for Raspberry Pi LoRaWAN Gateway“). Problem two can occur by user error (“you shall not turn it off without a sudo poweroff!”) or with the event of a power outage or black out. So for that problem I wanted to build a UPS for the Raspberry Pi.
Raspberry Pi with UPS System and tinyK22
In the age of high-resolution graphical LCDs using a character display might look like a bit anachronistic. But these displays provide a lot of value for me as they are robust, available in different shapes and number of lines. And such a character display can be a better solution for an industrial application.
hd44780 display with NXP FRDM-KW41Z Board
MCU on Eclipse 