Survey: After 0x8888888 Seconds, What’s Next?

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When I have hit ‘publish’ for this post, the McuOnEclipse blog exists for exactly 0x888888 seconds. Or almost. I admit there might be a latency of a few seconds. But hey, that’s still a good (hexadecimal) number! :-).

What Next

What Next?

I would like to reach out about what you would like to see on McuOnEclipse in a not too distant future:

  • What do you like the most?
  • About what should I write more?
  • Any other subject or topic you would like to see?

Add a comment if you have anything else on your mind.

Thank you!

Happy Polling 🙂

 

ARM Cortex-M, Interrupts and FreeRTOS: Part 1

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The ARM Cortex-M microcontroller are very popular. And it has a very flexible and powerful nested vectored interrupt controller (NVIC) on it. But for many, including myself, the Cortex-M interrupt system can be leading to many bugs and lots of frustration :-(.

NXP KV58F ARM Cortex-M7

ARM Cortex-M7: NXP KV58

Understanding the NVIC and the ARM Cortex-M interrupt system is essential for every embedded application, but even for if using an realtime operating system: if you mess up with interrupts, very bad things will happen….

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Prototype of Wireless Remote Controller with NXP Kinetis K20

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For next semester I plan to use the tinyK20 as a remote controller for the Zumo Robots. I already had an early prototype presented in “3D Printed Gameboy and Remote Controller with tinyK20 Board“, so here is the next iteration of, in a sneak preview:

Remote Controller Prototype

Remote Controller Prototype

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Avoid Warping ABS on Ultimaker 2

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3D printing is like cooking or like BBQ: It is more about barometric pressure, humidity and temperature than you might  think of. To me, printing (and cooking) is a combination of art and science. And as with cooking, sometimes the result is not usable.

I’m very happy with the Ultimaker 2 printing PLA material. For a LED matrix project I have to use ABS as this material is suitable for higher temperature: PLA simply will not stand the heat produced by the LEDs I’m going to use. And here the joy ended: printing using ABS was definitely no fun. While the first small test print came out OK, I produced afterwards a pile of unusable parts because of warping :-(.

Pile of bad ABS Parts

Pile of bad ABS Parts

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Eclipse and GDB: Process Properties, Arguments and GDB Traces

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To me this was new, and thanks to Liviu I know now how to inspect the command line passed to the GDB server (see “Semihosting (again!) with NXP Kinetis SDK V2.0“) 🙂

Process Properties

Process Properties

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Four States BBQ Sauce for Pulled Pork (or anything else)

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It seems that my pulled pork BBQ (see “Tutorial: BBQ Pulled Pork“) gets more and more fans :-). We will have a BBQ party for 10 person tomorrow evening :-). In preparation for that, the two pork shoulders started brining in the refrigerator from yesterday night on. Today we prepared the BBQ sauce for tomorrow, in four different styles: North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama and Kansas:

Four States BBQ Sauce

Four States BBQ Sauce

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Semihosting (again!) with NXP Kinetis SDK V2.0

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I kind of hoped that after “Why I don’t like printf()” and all my other articles about printf and semihosting, that topic would be 200% handled and I won’t have to deal with any more. Well, I was wrong and underestimated how the Kinetis SDK is interfering with semihosting. And I underestimated how many of my readers are still using semihosting (even as there are other and better alternatives), so I keep getting questions and requests for help. That’s ok, and I hope I can help :-).

So here is yet again another post about how to turn on semihosting with Eclipse, GNU ARM Embedded and the Kinetis SDK v2.0. This time with the FRDM-K64F board:

FRDM-K64F Board with lwIP running

FRDM-K64F Board

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Bricking and Recovering OpenSDA Boards in Windows 8 and 10

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Getting a board from a distributor like Farnell/Element14/Mouser (add your own distributor) means that chances are high that the default firmware on it is written years from now because the inventory has not been updated, or because boards are still produced with that original firmware (because of testing?). So what happens if I use board with a firmware developed pre-Windows 8/10 area?

Freshly Unboxed NXP FRDM-KL25Z Board

Freshly Unboxed NXP FRDM-KL25Z Board

It might work, but chances are high that the bootloader and firmware is not ready for the ‘modern age’, and as a result the board might be bricked. If you still have a Windows 7 machine around (I do!), you are lucky. If not, then you need to read this article….

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