In “openHAB RGB LED Light Cube with WS2812B and NXP Kinetis” I started experimenting Kinetis boards, a LED cube diffuser and Adafruit WS2812B NeoPixel LEDs. That worked well, but I was not to very happy about the visual effect. So here is my next version: I wanted to have control over each side of the cube. For this I have built a cube inside the cube with a 3D printed structure:
Bare LED Cube
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
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
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
By default, there are no Undo/Redo toolbar buttons in the Eclipse toolbar. With Eclipse as an open and extensible framework, how to add them?
Undo and Redo Toolbar Buttons in Eclipse
With the start of the new year 2016 I have published a new McuOnEclipse component release with the following major updates:
256 NeoPixel Matrix with FRDM-KL25Z
I’m not much monitoring what is happening on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, only for time reasons, but maybe I should? For a while I’m looking for the next level for the tinyK20 project: better and more powerful microcontroller with touch display/graphic LCD. And when I see a Freescale/NXP Kinetis microcontroller on a crowd funding platform like this one, I hardly can resist 😉 :
Blaze Board (Source: http://kck.st/1S0HyUp)
The tinyK20 boards are now used in several projects. Initially I was considering a commercial USB thumb drive enclosure for it. But this needed some tweaking of the enclosure so at the end it was not ideal. 3D printing is probably that hot topic for 2016. So why 3D printing an enclosure for that board?
3D Printed Enclosure for the tinyK20 board
In many of my embedded projects I’m using successfully the Nordic Semiconductor nRF24L01+ (see “Tutorial: Nordic Semiconductor nRF24L01+ with the Freescale FRDM-K64F Board“) and the HC-06 Bluetooth transceivers (see “Getting Bluetooth Working with JY-MCU BT_BOARD V1.06“) for wireless communication. However, the nRF24L01+ is using a proprietary protocol, and the HC-06 does not work with Apple products (it does very well with Android devices). To close that gap I decided to add Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE, or Bluetooth 4.x). So this post is about how to add Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to NXP (formerly Freescale) Kinetis devices:
BLE Enabled Kinetis
MCU on Eclipse 