Typically I have many, many projects listed in the Eclipse Project Explorer, usually more than 100 projects: from example projects, projects on git, lecture module projects, research projects or just some hobby projects I’m working on. With the default Eclipse settings, all these projects are listed in a ‘linear’ list. What I found really useful is the ability to group them into ‘Working Sets‘:
Grouped Projects in Eclipse Project Explorer
‘Dark’ or ‘Black’ themes are on vogue: some love it, some do not care. The good thing is that we all have a choice. Things are getting improved on the host OS (Windows/Linux) side, but the challenge is still on the application side, but things are getting better. This is true for the Eclipse based IDEs too, with the NXP MCUXpresso IDE V11.2.1 just recently released: it comes with improved Dark Theme support:
Tweaked MCUXpresso IDE Dark Theme
It is always great to see if someone is picking up my work and produces something even better :-). In this case, Gerhard Székely took my DIY Portable Video Conference, Sharing and Teaching Device and created an awesome version of it:
Camera to the front
COVID-19 is by far not over, and in Switzerland the infection rate is going up again (2nd wave?). During the spring 2020 semester university lock-down we moved pretty much everything to a ‘distance learning’ setup. With that experience and with the request to prepare for the fall semester, I have constructed a DIY conference and teaching device which should make things simpler and easier: a combination of video camera, speaker phone and a muting device:
Desk with Communicator C2020
Creating a new project with Eclipse for a microcontroller these days is fairly easy, and I have the choice if I want to start the project with C or C++:
Choice of C and C++ for a new project
Still the embedded microcontroller world is dominated by C and not C++. So while it is easy to start with a C++ project, most vendor provided example or tutorial project are C projects. So how can I transform such project to C++?
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:
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.
Continue readingI want to share with you a little embedded trick that I use to improve the reliability of my code. And in addition to improving reliability, the technique can be used to schedule any event to occur ‘sometime in the future’. It uses the MicroTick (UTICK) timer found on the NXP LPC55S69 microcontroller, and could be applied to any device with a simple timer.
The MicroTick timer is an elegant, thing of beauty. But there is not a driver example built into the lpcxpresso55s69 SDK, and I believe that the timer is not widely used. That means we need a tutorial!
Continue readingThe NMI is a special interrupt on ARM Cortex-M architecture: as the name indicates, it cannot be ‘masked’ by the usual ‘disable interrupts’ flags (PRIMASK, BASEPRI), similar to the Reset signal.
cortex-m-vector-table (Source: adapted from arm.com)
Dealing with the reset signal is kind of obvious, and most designs and boards have it routed to a reset button or similar. The NMI is less obvious if you don’t pay attention to it: most ARM-Cortex implementations and boards have the NMI signal routed to a pin and are ‘hiding’ it in the schematics behind a normal GPIO pin or port: if you don’t pay attention to the NMI functionality, the board might not work as intended.
As promised I’m going to share more details about the “60 Billion Lights” project. It is about a project to build a piece of electronics behind a 100×50 cm canvas to show animations or to display information like temperature, humidity, weather, time or just any arbitrary text.
Writing text
An essential tool especially developing larger applications or distributed firmware is to use logging. This article presents an open source logging framework I’m using. It is small and easy to use and can log to a console, to a file on the host or even to a file on an embedded file system as FatFS.
Log Output
MCU on Eclipse 