If you are not in the academic world, then you might wonder about that ‘LaTeX‘ in the title. and no, it is not about that latex rubber material ;-), it is about ‘la-tek’ 🙂
In short, it is a programming language and tool set to ‘compile’ documents. Originally, TeX has been designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. Since then, it has been evolved and TeX (or LaTeX) is widely used in academia.
Now I have implemented a watchdog with Processor Expert for my system. But what I have found out? I ended up with a looping system, and the watchdog did not fire 😦
What went wrong?
This week we were busy with building and documenting the first robots based on the Zumo Robot Chassis PCB.
The chassis is designed to hook up the FRDM-KL25Z board from Freescale. It is using parts from Pololu (chassis, motors, DC-DC converter, line sensor, H-Bridge, encoders):
Zumo Base Board Overview
In this semester course, students (and myself too, of course :-)) are building a Mini Sumo Robot. That robot is using the Freescale FRDM-KL25Z board with an ARM Cortex-M0+ on it. Today I’ll give an introduction to the ARM core to the class, and timing is right: this morning I have found an excellent overview about ARM microcontroller and tools written by Jay Carlson.: Getting Started with ARM Microcontrollers.
In my tutorial “Bits and Pins with Kinetis” I showed how to use the BitIO_LDD approach for Bit I/O access. I do not like this LDD (logical device driver) approach for several reasons:
Luckily, there is a way to hack around this 🙂
Excellent news: I received this week the 40 INTRO Zumo Robot Base/Chassis PCBs, ready to bring the Zumo Robot project based on the FRDM-KL25Z board from Freescale to the next level:
Intro Zumo PCB TopSide
On Friday, Freescale has updated CodeWarrior for MCU10 from V10.4 to V10.5, available on http://www.freescale.com/cwmcu10. I have not had much time to use it over the week-end, but here is a list of the things which in my view will make me switch my projects over to 10.5 and use it in my university classes:
The new semester is approaching fast! And I’m under pressure to get everything lined up and ready. This time, I want the students of the INTRO (Infotronic) course at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts to have some fun with building and programming Mini-Sumo Robots 🙂
No chance to escape!
Rigi Schwinget (Picture: Roman Koch)
Every three years, there is the “Eidgenössisches Schwing- und Älplerfest” in Switzerland. A really big thing for us here. If you are not familiar with what this is, then have a read about the long tradition of Schwingen in Switzerland.
Wondering what “Schwingen” or wrestling has to do with a technology blog? It is about having fun with robots!
Self-Motivation: I write this post in the hope to cut the number of ‘please help me’ emails in my inbox ;-):
If you want to debug one of the Freescale boards with OpenSDA (FRDM-KL25Z, FRDM-K20, FRDM-KL05Z, FRDM-KL46Z48M, FRDM-KL02Z, TWR-KL47Z48M, …), and if you get this dialog …
No Device Available
… then read on.
MCU on Eclipse 