‘Experience Energy’ at the Verkehrshaus: The ‘House of Energy’ Construction Kit

The ‘Verkehrshaus der Schweiz‘, the ‘Swiss Museum of Transport’ is Switzerland’s most popular museum.

In April 2023, it opened up a new building and the ‘Experience Energy!’ exhibition. For the opening event we created a unique construction kit to explore energy: from harvesting to storing and up to distributing and using energy.

“House of Energy” at the Swiss Museum of Transport in Lucerne
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Processor Expert Components: 24-Dec-2023 Release

The new year 2024 is coming, so time to close the current year with a new release: I’m pleased to announce a new release of the Processor Expert components, available on SourceForge and GitHub.

Processor Expert Components in Eclipse (KDS)

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McuOnEclipse Components: 26-Dec-2021 Release

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

SourceForge

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MCUXpresso SDK Tutorial – using I2C Driver on OKdo E1 board

In an earlier tutorial I introduced using I2C with the NXP LPC55S69 on OKdo E1 board to read a Bosch BME280 environmental sensor on a Mikroe Weather Click board. The MCUXpresso Clocks, Pins and Peripheral Config tools were used to get it running. It’s all for my Weather Station project that I’ve been working on during these months of lockdown. It is starting to take shape – as you can see from the photograph:

From the left: Mikroe Weather Click, OKdo E1, Mikroe eInk Click.

Now I really need to start reading and writing to the BME280 sensor, and that means using the I2C driver in the lpcxpresso55s69 SDK. And so this week I’ll provide a forensic examination of the most commonly-used I2C function call.

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MCUXpresso tutorial: I2C using the Pins/Clocks/Peripherals Config tools and lpcxpresso55s69 SDK

I selected the Bosch BME280 environmental sensor as the heart of my OKdo E1-based weather station. It is convenient to use, and I can prototype with the Mikroe Weather Click board MIKROE-1978. But the sensor is accessed over I2C, and that is my least favourite of the communication interfaces. In this short tutorial, I show you how the MCUXpresso Config tools (Pins, Clocks, Peripherals) are used to set up the I2C driver from the MCUXpresso lpcxpresso55S69 SDK. And very quickly, I am able to communicate with the BME280 sensor.

Reading BME280 “ID” register via I2C
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Driver for VL53L0X Time-Of-Flight (ToF) Sensor and NXP K20DX128

I’m using the VL6180X ToF (Time-of-Flight) sensors successfully in different projects. The VL6180X is great, but only can measure distances up to 20 cm and in ‘extended mode’ up to 60 cm. For a project I need to go beyond that, so the logical choice is the VL53L0X which measures between 30 cm and 100 cm or up to 200 cm. For this project I’m using the VL53L0X breakout board from Adafruit, but similar products are available e.g. from Pololu.

NXP K20dx128 with adafruit vl53l0x tof sensor

NXP K20dx128 with Adafruit VL53LOx tof sensor

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McuOnEclipse Components: 30-Sept-2018 Release

I’m pleased to announce a new release of the McuOnEclipse components, available on SourceForge. This release includes several bug fixes, extra support for the NXP S32 Design Studio and SDK and includes FreeRTOS V10.1.1.

SourceForge

SourceForge

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McuOnEclipse Components: 1-July-2018 Release

I’m pleased to announce that a new release of the McuOnEclipse components is available on SourceForge. This release includes several smaller bug fixes and initial component support for the NXP S32 Design Studio and SDK.

SourceForge

SourceForge

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McuOnEclipse Components: 1-Apr-2018 Release

It’s April Fool’s Day, but be assured this is not a joke ;-): I’m pleased to announce that a new release of the McuOnEclipse components is available in SourceForge. This release includes several smaller bug fixes and components have been upgraded for FreeRTOS V10.0.1.

SourceForge

SourceForge

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McuOnEclipse Components: 09-July-2017 Release

I’m pleased to announce that a new release of the McuOnEclipse components is available in SourceForge, with the following major changes and updates:

  • Complete refactoring for 1-Wire stack and DS18B20 temperature sensor components
  • Added HID Joystick device class to the FSL_USB_Stack
  • New SDK_Timer component to work with Kinetis SDK
  • New ST756P LCD driver component
  • New TSL2561 digitial temperature sensor driver
  • Added ReadByte() and WriteByte() GenericI2C functions
  • Added 64bit mapping functions to Utility
  • added configUSE_NEWLIB_REENTRANT and newlib reentrancy support to FreeRTOS
  • Pull resistor support for SDK_BitIO
  • Many smaller bug fixes and enhancements

SourceForge

SourceForge

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