The FRDM-KL25Z tracked robot from my earlier post has gone trough several upgrades:
Tracked Robot with Ultrasonic Sensor
Tracked Robot Update: Ultrasonic, Line Sensor and Shell with SMAC 802.15.4
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Category Archives: Embedded
Rollout of ‘julier’ Formula Student Race Car
Last Thursday the new Formula Student race car named ‘julier’ had its rollout to the public at Sauber Motorsports in Hinwil, Switzerland. Again a fully electrical racing car, but this time with 4-wheel drive, improved aero-pack and electronics, and able to get from 0 to 100 km/h in 2.6 seconds!
Julier racing (Source Benjamin Hildebrandt)
CMSIS-DAP with IAR and the KL25Z Freedom Board
Beside of USBDM, there is another Open Source implementation of a debug interface for the Freedom Board OpenSDA: CMSIS-DAP.
CMSIS-DAP (Source: http://nimblemachines.com/cmsis-dap/)
CMSIS-DAP stands for ‘Cortex Microcontroller Software Interface Standard – Debug Access Port’) has been published by ARM Inc. With this, there is an open source alternative to proprietary implementation (e.g. P&E OpenSDA or Segger OpenSDA).
Beside of the ARM MDK IDE, CMSIS-DAP is supported by Coocox and IAR. And IAR is what I’m using in this post.
Freedom Board with Segger OpenSDA Debug Firmware
Looks like there is some movement on the ‘OpenSDA Front’: After CodeRed has released their RedProbe OpenSDA firmware, now Segger has released an OpenSDA firmware.
With this, I get a low-cost debugging solution similar to the well-known J-Link run control devices. The OpenSDA Segger Firmware is something like a J-Link-lite.
FRDM-KL25Z with Segger OpenSDA Debug Firmware
Software Engineering for Embedded Systems
Yesterday was a great day: The book “Software Engineering for Embedded Systems” finally arrived 🙂 :
Software Engineering for Embedded Systems
Why I’m excited about this? Because I had the honor to contribute a chapter to that book 🙂
Freedom Track Robot with IEEE802.15.4/SMAC
My other robots based on the FRDM-KL25Z use Bluetooth as connectivity. This one is using a Freescale IEEE802.15.4/ZigBee/SMAC module:
Robot with SRB MC13213 Board as Remote Controller
Fix for 3.3V Voltage Drop on FRDM-KL25Z Board
With my Pololu line following robot I had strange problems with the sensor array: the sensor values were very unreliable. Until I have found the problem: Instead of the expected 3.3V, my FRDM-KL25Z RevD board provided 2.8V instead 3.3V on the P3V3 Arduino header pin:
Measured 2.8V on P3V3
And that voltage even was lower the more current I needed :-(. Luckily there is an easy hardware fix for this.
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Low-Level Coding with PDD (Physical Device Driver)
As with any software drivers: they are never perfect. The same applies to the Processor Expert components delivered in CodeWarrior for MCU10 or the DriverSuite too. That’s why I have created many more components which are available on GitHub here. All these components are using other components to reach the hardware. But what if a functionality is not exposed through the low-level component? Or what if I want direct access to the hardware? Up to now I had to choose either the Processor Expert way, or to do it in the ‘traditional’ way using an SDK like CMSIS or vendor supplied header files.
With MCU10.4, I noticed that there is another way: PDD (Physical Device Driver).
PDD in the Components View
USBDM 4.10.5 supports now MCU10.4
Adding/Removing Floating Point Format for S08 Projects
Usually I do *not* use floating point numbers in my projects. For this, I select ‘None’ during the project creation in CodeWarrior for MCU:
No Floating Point Selected
But what if I need to change my mind later? How to change such a ‘no-floating-point-needed’ project to one with floating point format support?
MCU on Eclipse 