Many applications need to store persistent (non-volatile) data at runtime: configuration data, error logs, sensor data, calibration values, etc. The question is: where to store that data? If it is only a few kBytes, an SD card or similar is an overkill. Adding an external EEPROM? Sure, that works, but adds an extra part to the design. Some microcontroller have internal EEPROM. But what if not? Why not using the microprocessor internal flash memory?
Internal FLASH vs. external EEPROM
The standard Eclipse registers view only shows the core registers:
Standard Registers View in Eclipse
I think it would be great to have a view to see all the device peripheral registers too?
Embedded System Registers View
If you want the same, then this article is for you. It works both for stock Eclipse and Freescale Kinetis Design Studion (KDS) 🙂
11 teams with a total of 14 robots participated at the May 2014 Mini-Sumo robot competition this week at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Horw/Switzerland.
Sumo, ready to battle
The Freescale FRDM-K64F is a great board for data logger applications: it has a powerful ARM Cortex M4F with 120 MHz, 1 MB Flash and 256 KByte RAM. Best of all: it already has a micro SD card socket on the board :-).
Data Logger with FRDM-K64F
For the next semester I will do things differently in my advanced embedded systems programming course (INTRO) at the University of Lucerne: Instead of using the Freescale provided CodeWarrior, we will use a DIY tool chain for ARM with Eclipse Kepler.
Eclipse Kepler Ready for Classroom Usage
That way we we can offer students an open and convenient tool chain for their lab work, course assignments and own projects both at work and at home. So this post is about spending about 30 minutes to build your own tool chain which then can passed to students and coworkers so they have a complete toolchain installed in a few minutes.
With the Joystick shield I have a convenient way to drive and control a Zumo Robot without a wired connection:
Joystick Shield with Robot
While things started promising, there was a power supply problem at the end to be solved…
I’m using both the Freescale MC1320x and Nordic Semiconductor nRF24L01+ 2.4GHz in many projects. To make it even easier to use these transceivers in the RNet stack, I have updated it with several new functions.
MC13202 and nRF24L01+
Thanks to the GNU ARM Eclipse plugins from Liviu it is easy to build and debug projects for all the different ARM cores. But I need to specify the device name in the debug configuration:
Device Name for Segger GDB Configuration
There must be an easier way for this? Yes, indeed, there is 🙂
Segger just has released their OpenSDAv2 firmware. The OpenSDAv2 firmware is different from the OpenSDAv1 as it is using a different memory map and bootloader. The OpenSDAv2 e.g. is present on the new FRDM-K64F board. The availability of the Segger firmware is definitely good news for any owner of the FRDM-K64F board: so far only the CMSIS-DAP firmware was available (on top of the mbed bootloader). With this, it was not possible to use the board with CodeWarrior, except with using an external P&E Multilink or Segger J-Link. With that new Segger J-Link OpenSDAv2 firmware, I can now use the FRDM-K64F with any IDE which supports the Segger J-Link :-).
FRDM-K64F with Segger OpenSDAv2 Firmware
The latest addition to my set of Arduino shields is a true fun thing: The ElecFreaks.com JoyStick Shield 🙂
ElecFreaks.com Joystick Board with FRDM-KL25Z and nRF24L01+
