Overnight it was raining a lot in the central part of Switzerland. Additionally it is warming up so it adds water with all the snow melting in the higher areas. As a result, a dangerous rock- and mudslide went down today nearby in Moutathal, damaging bridges and power lines. A video records the destructive power of nature:
Does everybody still know why in the ‘old’ days there was the need for running a ‘screen saver’ on the computer? With the modern LCD displays they lost their initial purpose. After “3D Printed Classic Mac Apple Watch Charging Station” I’m doing more ‘good old days’ 3D printing. The ‘elder ones’ might remember the “After Dark” screen saver software for Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows machines. Yes, that was 1991! For me most famous and iconic theme were the “Flying Toasters”:
Flying Toasters
Now there is a 3D printed version 🙂
Flying Toaster SD Card Holder
From my earlier work to use the NXP Kinetis with openHAB (see “Controlling NXP Freedom Board RGB LED with openHAB and Raspberry Pi“) it was only a small step to control a 20x20x20 cm light cube with 256 Adafruit WS2812 NeoPixels:
Kinetis RGB Cube with openHAB
There are plenty of different software packages available for microcontroller these days from all the silicon vendors. Finding a good software package is one challenge, getting what I really need is another one. Freescale is now part of NXP since December 2015, so this is probably the first release of the former Freescale part now as NXP: The NXP Kinetis SDK Version 2.0.
It comes with an interesting distribution way: instead of downloading huge packages with all-and-everything in it, I can build it ‘on demand’ online and get what I need, on demand from a web-based front end:
NXP Kinetis Expert with Kinetis SDK
In “Blinky LED with openHAB on Raspberry Pi” I have used openHAB on a Raspberry Pi to control an LED attached to the Pi, and in “Controlling NXP Freedom Board RGB LED with openHAB and Raspberry Pi” I have explored how to connect a NXP Freedom Board over USB CDC to the Raspberry Pi. In this article I’m going to combine both: to control the LED on a NXP Freedom board remotely with openHAB on the Raspberry Pi.
ColorPicker with openHAB and FRDM-KL25Z
My preferred variable format in Eclipse is hexadecimal (see “Debugging Variables in Hexadecimal with Eclipse“). However, this does not work well with floating point variables:
Floating Point Variables in Eclipse Variables View
The above view shows all variables having the value 0x0 (zero), but that’s actually not really true.
Many times it is very useful to debug multiple boards at the same time. For example if I’m debugging a communication stack between two boards: that way I can debug the protocol on both sides. Eclipse is a great framework which allows that. This post shows how to debug multiple boards (e.g. the NXP Freedom boards) in parallel from the same Eclipse IDE using GDB and the Segger J-Link:
Two NXP Freedom Boards debugged at the same time
Waiting in the cold in the early morning can have an aesthetic aspect:
Ice Flowers
When ice builds beautiful structures on glass we call it ‘Eis Blume‘ (‘Ice Flowers’). In the past this happened on the windows in unheated buildings. These days it is a rare species with all the heated building. This one is more like snow flakes building up nice structures. With the sun coming up in the background their beauty will be gone very soon….
Happy Icing .-)
The reset and signal line of a microcontroller is probably the most important signal to a microcontroller. And if things go wrong, then a first thing to check is the reset line. So having control over reset is an important aspect for embedded development. You would think that if you download a program to a microcontroller, the debug probe would put the device into reset at the start with a short pulse like this:
Reset Signal in Logic Analyzer
MCU on Eclipse 