There are two basic strategies in teaching:
I usually do the first method. But there is a lot of value in the second method too!
When I asked all student groups to solder the headers on the Freescale FRDM-KL25Z board, I received one report that the board does not work any more. A quick inspection of the board showed this:
How NOT to Solder the FRDM Board Headers
At FTF 2014, Freescale made the announcement that CodeWarrior won’t support all the new ARM Kinetis devices coming out in the future: they will be supported with the free-of-charge Kinetis Design Studio (KDS) instead. As for myself, this is a big shift from a well established CodeWarrior toolchain to something new. A question which came up recently several times in the forums and in other posts is: how do CodeWarrior and KDS compare with each other?
CW vs KDS
When I started this blog back on February 1st 2012 with a ‘hello world‘ post, I did not know where and how this well end up. WordPress.com (the host of this blog) counted 1862 views in that first month. 30 months later (time is flying by!), views they are beyond 100k every month! Thanks to you all for commenting and liking posts, which is very encouraging. And there was one suggesting made recently which I would like to address:
Compendium Page
Working in an engineering domain of electrical engineering and computer science, female engineers are clearly the minority, at least in my country. For example the ETH Zurich has less than 30% female students. The US National Science Foundation had published articles on that subject: Interestingly, 70% of young girls are interested in math and science, but they lose that interest afterwards.
Verizon Commercial 2014 (Source: Youtube)
Yesterday Friday afternoon, the students at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Horw showcased their last semester project work to the public at the university. There were many, many interesting projects, so here are a few to give an idea what has been accomplished …
Part of the Exhibition Area
This is the start of a multi-post tutorial about the Freescale Kinetis SDK, released back in April as beta version. The SDK a set of peripheral drivers, and will become the standard software foundation and drivers provided by Freescale for their ARM Cortex based devices. Similar what other vendors already do. While this is a good step, it is the same time very disruptive for my university projects with new Freescale Cortex-M devices. And with everything new (and beta), it needs time to learn. So this post is about creating a Do-It-Yourself Kinetis SDK project from scratch for Eclipse. This part is about the startup code: about everything to get the application started.
FRDM-K64F with SD, nRF24L01+ and HC-06 Bluetooth
Working in an international environment means participating in conference calls. Instead to travel, meet and discuss face-to-face, it means dialing into a phone conference ‘bridge’. This can be augmented with ‘Netmeeting’ or other means of sharing files or desktop content.
A conference call in real life
The existing OpenSDAv1 (see “OpenSDA on the Freedom KL25Z Board“) bootloader is using the industry standard Motorola S-Record (S19) Files. However, new FRDM-K64F board (see “FTF: FRDM-K64F, Kinetis Design Studio and Kinetis SDK“) has OpenSDAv2 on it, which is an mbed bootloader. So how to create files with an IDE other than mbed for that bootloader which is present on the FRDM-K64F board by default? Well, creating binary files is one thing, but to have it working with the mbed bootloader is another challenge :-(.
FRDM-K64F with mbed MSD bootloader
My students and everyone in my office know me: I’m a HUGE fan of Dilbert. There is rarely a lecture for which I do not have a Dilbert cartoon which shows the daily life of an engineer in as few as 3 cartoons. Humor is a good way to reflect behaviour and to have a laugh, so usually I tell every week a fun story to the class. I collect fun stories from students, from my family, my peers, or from my life as teacher, researcher and engineer.
And here I share my newest fun story (a video this time): An engineer as ‘expert’ in a business/requirement meeting. The task is simple: create seven red lines. But the twist is that these lines must be perpendicular…
The Meeting with the Expert
I’m returning from the Embedded World in Nürnberg/Germany. A very busy schedule, a crowed exhibition, and a *lot* of good stuff. IoT (Internet of Things) was everywhere, to the point that I heard from visitors that they do not want to hear it anymore, about it because it so over-used ;-). And it seems that every vendor wants to have its feet in it, without really knowing where it could go. Sounds like in the early days of the ‘internet’, and everyone fears that if he has not ‘IoT’ somewhere, they might miss something.
But the topic here is something completely different: I was staying at a small and inexpensive hotel near the city center. I returned last night around 11pm. I was really tired from the long day, and with a heavy notebook back with me. I was going to enter the elevator to the upper floors, when I saw this signage on the elevator door (sorry the bad image quality):
Elevator Door Sign
So there I was staying in front of that door, about to press the button, still thinking about the consequences. Not a good sign. Can I take the risk? What would you do?
Happy Elevating 🙂
MCU on Eclipse 