With the Zumo I have a base platform for cool robotics applications. So why not build a line following robot with this? Especially as Pololu offers a reflectance sensor array for it. The result is: I have a line following robot 🙂
Line Following ZumoBot
It turned out that things were not working out of the box with the FRDM-KL25Z board. So if you want to do the same thing, here are some tips how to make it working with the Freedom board.
In this post I tapped into how to print messages to a console using the Kinetis/Freedom board. I’m not a fan of printf() for multiple reasons: It is simply a bad thing for embedded systems programming. But as many have asked for it, here is how to say “hello” from the Freedom Board using printf():
Hello World on the Terminal
Processor Expert in Eclipse and CodeWarrior is cool thing, and acts as the ‘expert’ for anything around the microcontroller used. But by default, it is acting in the ‘Basic’ level only.
Component Inspector Levels
But there are ways to get it to the Expert level :-).
When I have asked by a student last year if I’m uing Git, I said “Git what?”. Yep, a shame I did not know what Git was a this time. But it is never to late to learn new things.
I was coming from CVS, moved to the successor of it (SVN) and was happy with it. Especially with having a local SVN server and repository, that was (and still is) a great thing. But to truely collaborate with a worldwide community, it is time to use something different: Git.
GitHub Bootcamp: 4 simple steps to git
Question: What makes 8 times ‘beep’, but I cannot hear it?
Answer: My ultrasonic range finder 🙂
FRDM-KL25Z with HC-SR04
What I have added to my FRDM-KL25Z board is an ultrasonic distance sensor, measuring distances up to 4 meters.
Controlling a LED is a great starter for any embedded project: simple and you immediately get feedback if it works :-). Even better: as driving a LED is not different from working with another digital I/O or controlling a solenoid, the ‘LED’ concept and driver is very universal. I recently have simplified my Processor Expert LED component, so it might be a good time to add some more functionality again ;-). Let’s add support for PWM, and adding a shell interface on top of it. That way the LED is dimmable, plus I can do everything with a command interface as well:
LED Properties
With Processor Expert projects, I have a nice overview of pins used in my application:
Processor View
While that Processor View is nice, I want a list of pins and signals too:
The year 2012 is coming to an end, and luckily the end of the world is postponed :-). So time to make plans for the year 2013! And here is one I would like to ask your opinion about it: A public repository for Processor Expert components.
Ahrg! Again my ARM application crashed somewhere and I ended up in a HardFault exception :-(. In my earlier post I used a handler to get information from the processor what happened. But it is painful to add this handler again and again. So I decided to make things easier for me: with a special HardFault Processor Expert component :-).
After adding this HardFault component to my project, it automatically adds an entry to the vector table. So no manual steps are needed: having the component in the project and enabled will do the needed steps.
Sometimes it takes a while until things get better. Same thing applies to software: from time to time a refactoring and simplification makes sense. Especially if the underlying technology has been improved. With CodeWarrior for MCU10.3 available, it is time to refactor the LED component.
MCU on Eclipse 