Mini-Sumo Robot Competition May 2014 in Horw

11 teams with a total of 14 robots participated at the May 2014 Mini-Sumo robot competition this week at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Horw/Switzerland.

Sumo, ready to battle

Sumo, ready to battle

Continue reading

Tutorial: Data Logger with the FRDM-K64F Board

The Freescale FRDM-K64F is a great board for data logger applications: it has a powerful ARM Cortex M4F with 120 MHz, 1 MB Flash and 256 KByte RAM. Best of all: it already has a micro SD card socket on the board :-).

Data Logger with FRDM-K64F

Data Logger with FRDM-K64F

Continue reading

Reducing Compile Time in Eclipse with Parallel Build

Feeling that building a project in Eclipse (including Kinetis Design Studio) takes a long time? Then probably the ‘parallel build’ option is not enabled in your project: Using parallel build option reduces the needed time by factors. To give an example, to build a project with 56 source files takes 32 seconds without parallel build enabled:

no parallel build

no parallel build

With parallel build enabled this gets reduced down to less than 10 seconds:

Parallel Build Enabled

Parallel Build Enabled

🙂

Continue reading

Constructing a Classroom IDE with Eclipse for ARM

For the next semester I will do things differently in my advanced embedded systems programming course (INTRO) at the University of Lucerne: Instead of using the Freescale provided CodeWarrior, we will use a DIY tool chain for ARM with Eclipse Kepler.

Eclipse Kepler Ready for Classroom Usage

Eclipse Kepler Ready for Classroom Usage

That way we we can offer students an open and convenient tool chain for their lab work, course assignments and own projects both at work and at home. So this post is about spending about 30 minutes to build your own tool chain which then can passed to students and coworkers so they have a complete toolchain installed in a few minutes.

Continue reading

C/C++ Watchpoints with Eclipse Kepler

In “Watchpoints: Data Breakpoints” I used the Eclipse based CodeWarrior to set breakpoints so the debugger stops when my application is writing or reading a certain memory location. That CodeWarrior is based on an earlier Eclipse version, and things are different in Eclipse Kepler and not so easy to find. So here is how I can use watchpoints in Eclipse Kepler:

Watchpoints in Breakpoint View

Watchpoints in Breakpoint View

Continue reading

Joystick Shield with nRF24L01 driving a Zumo Robot

With the Joystick shield I have a convenient way to drive and control a Zumo Robot without a wired connection:

Joystick Shield with Robot

Joystick Shield with Robot

While things started promising, there was a power supply problem at the end to be solved…

Continue reading

Enhanced RNet Wireless Components and Communication Stack

I’m using both the Freescale MC1320x and Nordic Semiconductor nRF24L01+ 2.4GHz in many projects. To make it even easier to use these transceivers in the RNet stack, I have updated it with several new functions.

MC13202 and nRF24L01+

MC13202 and nRF24L01+

Continue reading

GNU ARM Eclipse & Segger J-Link Device Name Settings

Thanks to the GNU ARM Eclipse plugins from Liviu it is easy to build and debug projects for all the different ARM cores. But I need to specify the device name in the debug configuration:

Device Name for Segger GDB Configuration

Device Name for Segger GDB Configuration

There must be an easier way for this? Yes, indeed, there is 🙂

Continue reading