This time we were hiking around the Rothenflue: a wonderful area close by the Grosser Mythen, with stunning views.
Gleitschirm über Talkessel von Schwyz
The question has been: If I buy such a 50 Watt cheap laser cutter from China, how many Watts does it really have? I have read all these stories that usually what is advertised is only the theoretical maximum I could get, and will not be realistic at all. This article is about how I tuned the machine and how much I got out of it.
Different Laser Power
We are creating a new course (PRG-G) at the Lucerne University. This course teaches C programming and is part of the new curriculum in EE (Electrical Engineering). Every student will receive a microcontroller board on an extension board as give-away, in a custom card box for the board and cable. To make things a bit more exciting, why not laser engrave that box? That gives me a perfect excuse to experiment with the laser cutter 🙂
Laser Engraved Card Box
Have a read at http://embedded.fm/blog/2017/8/12/dont-use-arduino-for-professional-work.
I love the Arduino ecosystem, and it is great for getting something up and running quickly for a ‘proof of concept’. But it stops at that point.
I think it should be obvious why Arduino (code and libraries) should not be used for professional work. Especially the lack of proper debugging support makes it nearly impossible to solve the problems of the real world.’printf()’ style of debugging is simple, but it is a huge waste of time. I have seen too many student projects failing because the inability to properly debug the system and solve the problems.
Even equally important for professional work is the topic of IP and licensing. Be aware of the licensing terms and conditions as pointed out by above article. If not, your product easily get GPL’d which might not want you want.
Arduino
Happy Arduinoing 🙂
Eclipse is probably the most used and de-facto standard IDE for any development for ARM Cortex or any other devices. It is very easy these days to construct an unlimited and unrestricted IDE (see “Breathing with Oxygen: DIY ARM Cortex-M C/C++ IDE and Toolchain with Eclipse Oxygen“). Up to the point that I can pack it into a .zip file and pass it around e.g. in a class room environment, so no installer at all is needed with the exception of the debug probe USB drivers. As Eclipse is using a Java Virtual Machine (VM), it is a good idea to bundle the VM with the IDE, and this article is about how to do this.
Eclipse Oxygen running with its own Java Virtual Machine
There are people around me who think I’m crazy. And they are probably right. Who else would buy a machine from someone he does not know. I have to pay upfront. It is not clear how things will get delivered, what gets delivered, or if it gets delivered at all. Up to the point I can lose the money I have spent. Best of all: that machine is dangerous enough to potentially kill me. And it has the potential to put my home on fire too. Well, that sounds like an exciting weekend project, or not?
60 kg Weekend Project Box arrived on the front door
In “EmbSysRegView 0.2.6 for Eclipse Neon and Oxygen” I have described how to add CMSIS-SVD register detail files to Eclipse using the EmbSysRegView plugin.
But what I need to add vendor or any other SVD files to it? Here is how:
EmbSys Registers View
Eclipse as IDE takes care about compiling and building all my source files. But in an automated build system I would like to build it from the command line too. While using make files (see “Tutorial: Makefile Projects with Eclipse“) is an option, there is another easy way to build Eclipse projects from the command line:
Building MCUXpresso IDE from Command Line
This hike has been on my ‘must-hike’ list since last summer, and when I saw Urška writing about recently, it got definitely on my top list of things. The Oeschinen Lake (German: Oeschinensee) is a beautiful lake in the Bernese Overland, Switzerland, east of Kandersteg, and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site:
Oeschinensee view from Heuberg
Last month (June 2017), the latest version of Eclipse “Oxygen” has been released, and I have successfully used it in several embedded projects. Time to write a tutorial how to use it to build a custom Do-It-Yourself IDE for ARM Cortex-M development: simple, easy, unlimited and free of charge. While the DIY approach takes a few minutes more to install, it has the advantage that I have full control and I actually know what I have.
Eclipse Oxygen
Sometimes it happens that arm-none-eabi-gdb complains about “no source file named” in the GDB console view in Eclipse when I debug a project with GDB:
No Source File Named in GDB Console
I love 3D printing as it enables me to create custom enclosures for all kind of projects. The NXP LPC-Link2 probe is great, but it lacks a protective enclosure. So I decided to create a custom enclosure. And as 3D filaments are available in different colors, I experimented with red and black and custom painting:
lpc-link2 enclosure
FreeRTOS seems to get more and more popular, and I think as well because more and more debugger and Eclipse IDE vendors add dedicated debugging support for it.
FreeRTOS Threads in Eclipse
Good news! There is an updated version of the EmbSysRegView v0.2.6 available which works now for Eclipse Neon and Oxygen :-).
EmbSys
So we prepared a hiking trip the day before. The weather forecast said “mostly sunny”. Only to find out that the weather was not that great in the morning. Yes, true: Technically the sun is shining, at least above the clouds:
Mostly Sunny? A good day for a hiking tour!
By default, the GNU Linker expects a very special naming scheme for the libraries: the library name has to be surrounded by “lib” and the “.a” extension:
lib<NAME>.a
But what if the library I want to use does not conform to that naming standard?
Non-conforming Library Naming
The benefit of an IDE like Eclipse is: it makes working with projects very easy, as generates make files and it takes and automatically manages the make file(s). But sometimes this might not be what I want because I need greater flexibility and control, or I want to use the same make files for my continues integration and automated testing system. In that case a hand crafted make file is the way to go.
One thing does not exclude the other: This article explains how to use make files with Eclipse with similar comfort as the managed build system in Eclipse, but with the unlimited power of make files:
Makefile Project with Eclipse
It was a very spontaneous hiking tour this Sunday afternoon: a hike up to the Wildspitz mountain and the border between the Canton Schwyz and Zug. Full of beautiful views, flowers and awesome butterflies!
The boarder between the Canton of Schwyz and Canton of Zug is marked with several stones. Below stone No. 18 (dated 1907) near at Langmatt:
Grenzstein Langmatt
NXP has released an updated of their Eclipse based IDE for ARM Cortex-M (Kinetis and LPC) microcontroller: the version v10.0.2 build 411:
MCUXpresso v10.0.2 build 411
