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
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.
FreeRTOS is pretty much everywhere because it is so simple and universal, and it runs from the smallest to the biggest systems. But it still might be that for the microcontroller device you have selected there is no example or SDK support for it from your vendor of choice. In that case: no problem: I show how you could easily add FreeRTOS plus many more goodies to it.
Binky on NXP LPC845-BRK Board
Or… MCUXpresso Clocks Configuration tutorial using OKdo E1 board.
At the university we collect and recycle: bottles, batteries, glass, electronics and metal. Somebody did not have any use for a bunch of copper wires. I thought: there must be a better second live for it. This is how it looks:
Copper Wire Tree
I’m using the NXP Kinetis K22FN512 in many projects, either with the FRDM-K22F or on the tinyK22: with 120 MHz, 512 KByte FLASH and 128 KByte it has plenty of horsepower for many projects. The other positive thing is that it is supported by the NXP MCUXpresso IDE and SDK. I have now created an example which can be used as base for your own project, featuring FreeRTOS, FatFS, MinIni and a command line shell.
FRDM-K22F with SD Card
This week I’m sharing my experience “getting started” with the OKdo E1 board. This board, featuring the NXP LPC55S69 150 MHz, dual Cortex M33 core microcontroller was a joy to use. OKdo have provided an online Getting Started guide, and I’ve field-tested this for you. My video tutorial recorded as I follow the guide is less than 7 minutes long… it may take you a little longer if you need to download MCUXpresso IDE or the lpcxpresso55s69 Software Development Kit (SDK) but I am confident that you will quickly have the board up-and-running.
Continue readingOpenPnP is a great open source framework for building a DIY SMT Pick&Place machine. But it does not stop there: It is possible to use OpenPnP with a commercial pick & place machine, for example the Charmhigh CHM-T36VA. This Chinese machine comes with its own controller software which works but is not that great. The good news is that it is possible to hack and retrofit the machine so it can run the much more powerful OpenPnP.
Retrofitted CHM-T36VA
Using the debugger to inspect the application data is a very convenient thing. But if the data grows and if the data set is large, it makes more sense to dump the data to the host and process it offline. GDB is the de-facto debugger engine and includes a powerful command line and scripting engine which can be used in Eclipse too.
GDB Debugger Console in Eclipse
Especially in a lab or classroom environment it is convenient to start with a template project, and then explore different ways to shape the project for different needs. As for any IDE of this world, this requires an understanding of the inner workings to get it right. So in this article I show how to copy, clone or rename properly an Eclipse ‘template’ project in the MCUXpresso IDE.
Template Project
MCU on Eclipse 