A desktop CNC is a great addition to any 3D printer or laser cutter. I consider them ‘the trinity’ for any maker garage. While a desktop CNC is great for wood and some metals like aluminum or brass, it would be great to extend the infrastructure with something more: vinyl cutting. And with this the idea to have cool sticker on my laptop lid:
Welcome to ‘Alice in Wonderland‘! For a university research project using an ARM Cortex-M33 we are evaluating position-independent code as way to load applications or part of it with a bootloader. It sounds simple: just add -fPIC to the compiler settings and you are done.
Unfortunately, it is not that simple. That option opened up a ‘rabbit hole’ with lots of wonderful, powerful and strange things. Something you might not have been aware of what could be possible with the tools you have at hand today. Leading to the central question: how is position-independent code going to work with an embedded application on an ARM Cortex-M?
Let’s find out! Let’s start a journey through the wonderland…
Continue readingThis is a new article in my series about using Microsoft Visual Studio Code: After installation, project setup, building, debugging, setting up a kit and IntelliSense. This one is about setting up and using FreeRTOS:
I always have been fascinated by electromechanical stuff like these Flip-Dot Displays.
Dangling pointers and memory corruption problems are nasty issues for any developer, and usually hard to find and locate in the code. Luckily Google has developed an open source tool to solve such issues: the Address Sanitizer (ASAN). The tool is available for x86 and other desktop style architectures, including Android and Linux. This article describes how ASAN can be used for an embedded target, e.g. ARM Cortex-M4 or similar.
Managed linker scripts are great on one side: the simplify the otherwise complex GNU linker script handling. On the other side it requires knowledge how to tweak them in case ‘non-standard’ behavior is needed.
The previous parts were about installation, project setup, building, debugging and setting up a kit. This one is about setting up IntelliSense for Cross Development in Visual Studio Code which allows for browsing symbols or code completion:
One major concern of embedded system development is performance. Microcontroller have more MHz than in the past, but embedded applications are all about timing and real-time aspects.
The challenge is: how to get data off the target in realtime? SWO can help with this….
Continue readingIf a Cortex microcontroller is unresponsive to a debug connection for various reasons, then this trick might help to recover that device for you. All you need is a debug probe from PEMICRO and a utility.
For a research project we selected the NXP LPC55S16 but because it has due the silicon shortage it is not available probably for the next 52 weeks (yikes!) we can use the EVK Board.
The FatFS file system from Elm Chan is the de-facto file system for many embedded systems. As such it comes integrated with silicon vendor SDKs like the NXP MCUXpresso SDK. The problem is that the SDK only has examples for things on the board, and because that board does not have a SD card socket, no example for using FatFS with an SDK card is provided :-(. So I had to create one, and you can get it from GitHub.
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MCU on Eclipse 