From todays mountain tour: View to the heart-shaped Stein Lake below the Stein Glacier.
Steingletscher (click to enlarge)
Stein Glacier with Stein Lake
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Showcase of Student Project Exhibition 2014 in Horw
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
Snake Game on the FRDM-KL25Z with Nokia 5110 Display
So I have a graphics driver for a Nokia display (see “Zero Cost 84×48 Graphical LCD for the Freedom Board“), I have a joystick shield (see “JoyStick Shield with the FRDM Board“) and I do have a Freescale Freedom board: why not creating a simple game for it? Snake!
Snake Game with FRDM-KL25Z Board
Replicating an Eclipse Update Site for Offline Usage
In my post “Constructing a Classroom IDE with Eclipse for ARM” I outlined how to build a DIY Eclipse distribution. That way I can build an archive/zip and distribute to my students: it saves them a lot of time, and they do not need to download things from the internet themselves, as I can give them the thing on a memory stick. But what if I want them to give them the update site files for offline usage too? For example CodeWarrior has an online update site:
Online Update Site
How can I make a local copy of it to use in my classroom?
Tutorial: Nordic Semiconductor nRF24L01+ with the Freescale FRDM-K64F Board
For some time I’m using the Nordic Semiconductor nRF24L01+ transceiver successfully in many projects (see “Tutorial: Ultra Low Cost 2.4 GHz Wireless Transceiver with the FRDM Board“). Since that tutorial things evolved a lot with the introduced RNet Stack. To honor the popularity of the Nordic Semiconductor nRF24L01+, Freescale has put a socket on the FRDM-K64F board. So time to make a new step-by-step tutorial how to use the nRF24L01+ with the FRDM-K64F.
Two FRDM-K64F Boards with nRF24L01+ Transceiver
First New Zumo Board out of the Reflow Oven
Andreas populated the first board with SMD parts and sent it through the reflow oven. The 32 kHz quartz is missing because not all parts arrived on time. The soldering of the Freescale Kinetis K22 microcontroller is not perfect yet, so will need some tweaking and inspection under the microscope, as well some other parts. Christian will do an inspection and electrical tests, then it will be my job to get it connected to the debugger. Keep my fingers crossed to get a blinking LED 🙂
First new Zumo Robot Board, out of the Reflow Oven
New Zumo Robot PCBs Arrived!
As you might have read it already: for the new semester we plan the next generation of Sumo Robots: still based on the Pololu Zumo Chassis, but instead using the FRDM board with the processor, we directly put a Kinetis K20 processor on the board :-).
Old (top) and new (bottom) PCB with solder mask
Slow 32 kHz Oscillator Startup
In an IoT (Internet of Things, see “IoT: FreeRTOS Down to the Micro Amps“) project I’m using the Freescale KL15Z microcontroller. The nodes are moving around, and the board is using a special inductive charging ‘on the fly’ when nearby the charging station. The energy is stored in capacitors, so no batteries are needed. That worked very well, but some system failed: they need to quickly check sensor signals after power-up. Tracking down the problem, it was obvious that most of the systems failed because it took them too long to boot from the power-on reset. So I instrumented the application to toggle an LED so I can monitor what happens: It was over 400 ms after power-on! Yikes!
413 ms for startup
Finding Settings in Processor Expert Components
Processor Expert components are making things very easy to configure: go a component, use the component inspector and change a setting. However, with the devices getting more and more complex, the list of settings or properties get longer and longer. To the point that it is hard to find a setting.
For example, where are the settings for the PLL in the CPU component?
Component with Settings
FILLing unused Memory with the GNU Linker
In many of my applications I use a CRC/checksum to verify that the code/flash on the target is not modified. For this, not only the code/data in flash counts, but as well all the unused gaps in the memory map. Instead to leave it up to the flasher/debugger (which usually erases it to 0xFF), I want to fill it with my pattern. The GNU linker is using the pattern 0x00 for unused bytes inside sections. So this post is about to use the GNU linker to ‘fill’ the uninitalized FLASH memory with a pattern.
FLASH with DeadBeef Pattern
MCU on Eclipse 