Tag Archives: FLASH

Add extra Storage to the Raspberry Pi Pico with W25Q128 and LittleFS

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The RP2040 Pico board comes with 2 MByte onboard FLASH memory. While this is plenty of space for many embedded applications, sometimes it needed to have more storage space. Having the ability to adding an extra SPI FLASH memory with a useful file system comes in handy in such situations. This makes the RP2040 ideal for data logger applications or otherwise store a large amount of data. In this article I’ll show you how to add an extra 16 MByte of memory to the Raspberry Pi Pico board, running FreeRTOS, a command line shell and using LittleFS as the file system.

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Recovering bricked LPC55Sxx EVK Boards

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While developing applications, it can happen that things go wrong. And in my case I ended up with two LPC55Sxx EVK boards on my desk, which seemed not to be usable any more. The issue: the boards were not accessible with the debug probe, because right after main they muxed the pins in a wrong way :-(.

bricked board with set of debut probes

The standard GDB debug connections (both on-board and off-board) were not able to regain access of the board, because the MCU was running into the fault condition pretty much right out of reset.

Luckily, after a lot of trial-and-error, I have found a way to recover them.

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Doubling the performance of NXP LPC845 with improved Flash Access Time

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For more than two years I’m using the NXP LPC845 in my university courses. Beside of that it is used in many projects. First, because the LPC845-BRK board is small, breadboard friendly and inexpensive. Second, for many small projects that Cortex-M0+ provides just the right amount of processing power and memory.

NXP LPC845-BRK Board
NXP LPC845-BRK Board

If you search for ‘LPC845’ on my blog, you will find many articles about it. We are using the LPC845 in a research project, and one developer asked me why the LPC845 seems to run slower than expected. And I was sure that I wrote already an article about this, but to my disappointment: even Google did not find it? So complete this unfortunate gap, here is it: how to optimize the LPC845 and running it at full speed, with the hand-brake released.

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Key-Value pairs in FLASH Memory: file-system-less minINI

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Many embedded systems application need to store some kind of data in a persistent way: calibration values, settings or log information. For a smaller amount of data, using an external memory or file system is an overkill. In many system I’m using minINI to store key-value pars in in a ‘ini-file’ way, but it requires the use of a file system of some kind. minINI is great and efficient, and makes getting and storing data really easy. But for simple cases, a single FLASH memory page or sector is just all what I need. Instead managing that page directly, why not using minINI without a file system?

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Using SEGGER J-Link with QSPI FLASH on NXP i.MX Boards

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In “Seeed Studio Arch Mix NXP i.MX RT1052 Board” and “Debug and Execute Code from FLASH on the Seeed Arch Mix NXP i.MX RT1052 Board” I have used the NXP LPC-Link2 to debug the Seeed Arch Mix board with the NXP i.MX RT1052, because the SEGGER J-Link does not work out-of-the box with the i.MX RT using QSPI Flash. This article shows how the J-Link connection can be changed from HyperFlash to work with QSPI Flash.

J-Link EDU Mini with Seeed i.MX RT1052

J-Link EDU Mini with Seeed i.MX RT1052

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Log2Ram: Extending SD Card Lifetime for Raspberry Pi LoRaWAN Gateway

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My LoRaWAN gateway (“Contributing an IoT LoRaWAN Raspberry Pi RAK831 Gateway to The Things Network” is running and working great now for more than a month and it already has transmitted more than 30k messages:

Gateway Overview

Gateway Overview

This creates a lot of log entries on the micro SD card of the Raspberry Pi. To avoid writing too many times log data, I have installed Log2Ram.

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