MCU on Eclipse

On a lifelong learning journey …

Building a Raspberry Pi UPS and Serial Login Console with tinyK22 (NXP K22FN512)

Posted on May 5, 2019 by Erich Styger

There are different ways to ruin a Linux system. For the Raspberry Pi which uses a micro SD card as the storage device by default, it comes with two challenges:

Excessive writes to the SD card can wear it out
Sudden power failure during a SD card write can corrupt the file system

For problem one I do I have a mitigation strategy (see “Log2Ram: Extending SD Card Lifetime for Raspberry Pi LoRaWAN Gateway“). Problem two can occur by user error (“you shall not turn it off without a sudo poweroff!”) or with the event of a power outage or black out. So for that problem I wanted to build a UPS for the Raspberry Pi.

Raspberry Pi with UPS System and tinyK22

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First Steps with the LPC55S69-EVK (Dual-Core ARM Cortex-M33 with Trustzone)

Posted on April 22, 2019 by Erich Styger

For the long Easter weekend I have organized a new toy: the NXP LPC55S69-EVK board: a dual ARM Cortex-M33 running at 100 MHz with ARM TrustZone:

LPC55S69 Microcontroller

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Tutorial: MCUXpresso SDK with Linux, Part 2: Commandline Debugging with GDB

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Erich Styger

In “Tutorial: MCUXpresso SDK with Linux, Part 1: Installation and Build with Maked” I used cmake and make to build the SDK application. In this part I’m going to use the command line gdb to debug the application on the board.

Cross-Debugging with GDB

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Tutorial: MCUXpresso SDK with Linux, Part 1: Installation and Build with Make

Posted on April 14, 2019 by Erich Styger

I admit: my work laptop machine is running a Windows 10 OS by default. But this does not prevent me running Linux in a Virtual Machine (VM). Each host platform has its benefits, and I don’t feel biased to one or the other, but I have started using Ubuntu more and more, simply because I have worked more on Embedded Linux projects. While I have used mostly Windows with Eclipse for NXP LPC, Kinetis and i.MX platforms in the past, I started using Ubuntu too from last year with the NXP MCUXpresso SDK. I did not find much documentation about this on the web, so I thought it might be a good idea to write a tutorial about it. So here we go…

Building NXP MCUXpresso SDK on Linux Ubuntu

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Tutorial: RAK813 LoRaWAN+BLE+GPS Sensor Node with Eclipse IDE

Posted on March 23, 2019 by Erich Styger

In the IoT world, it is all about security, connectivity and low power. LoRaWAN with the Things Network is able to connect devices over several kilometers, and I’m running my gateway for it already (see “Contributing an IoT LoRaWAN Raspberry Pi RAK831 Gateway to The Things Network“). This tutorial is about building a BLE+LoRaWAN+GPS sensor node with GNU tools and Eclipse:

LoRa+BLE with RAK813 and LPC845

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Contributing an IoT LoRaWAN Raspberry Pi RAK831 Gateway to The Things Network

Posted on February 25, 2019 by Erich Styger

LoRa and LoRaWAN is getting the de-facto wireless IoT network in my area. No surprise that traditional telecom providers like Swisscom trying to monetize the ‘Internet of Things’ area. Luckily there is an open and free alternative: https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/. Volunteers, enthusiasts and members in the different TTN communities build gateways and offer free LoRaWAN network access. I wanted to contribute to that grassroots movement with building my gateway, providing LoRaWAN access to my neighborhood.

LoRaWAN TheThingsNetwork Gateway

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MCUXpresso IDE V10.3.1 available

Posted on February 24, 2019 by Erich Styger

On Friday a new release of the Eclipse Oxygen based NXP MCUXpresso IDE V10.3.1 has been made available. The IDE supports MacOS, Linux and Windows 32/64-bit and will be 64-bit only going forward.

MCUXpresso 10.3.1 About Information

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Different Ways of Software Configuration

Posted on February 23, 2019 by Erich Styger

Most of the time software needs some way to configure things: depending on the settings, the software will do different things. For example the software running on the microcontroller on top of the Raspberry might have the OLED LCD available or not:

Raspberry Pi and tinyK22 (NXP Kinetis K22FN512) with OLED LCD

How can I deal with this in my application code? Continue reading →

Tutorial: Changing ARM Cortex Core or Microcontroller in Eclipse CDT Projects

Posted on February 9, 2019 by Erich Styger

Sometimes I start a project with an ARM microcontroller, and in the middle of the project I find out that it was a wrong choice at the beginning and I need to switch the microcontroller derivative or even the used ARM core. With little knowledge of the project structure and the files needed, such a switch is not the easiest thing, but definitely possible.

switching cores

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Tutorial: Blinky with the NXP LPC845-BRK Board

Posted on February 3, 2019 by Erich Styger

The NXP LPC845-BRK board is a sub-$6 breadboard friendly development board with an ARM Cortex-M0+ on it. This tutorial is about developing a ‘blinky’ on it using MCUXpresso.

Binky on NXP LPC845-BRK Board

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