PLAY Embedded is a blog about embedded systems. We created this blog in the 2015 to share our discoveries with enthusiasts all around the world. This blog is largely focused on the usage of free and open source software.
All the content on this website is created in our spare time, and we have no interest in make any money from this. This blog is completely ads free and we love to get in touch with our small but passionate community: any feedback and suggestion is very welcome.
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Recently I had to assemble ChibiStudio for Windows from scratch and I decided to write down a simple to-do list to be consistent over time. Locking back to the list, it was so detailed I start to think about an article to share this experience and enable everyone to assembly its own environment ...
A debugger is a powerful tool that gives us the chance to interact with the microcontroller at run-time. It allows to dynamically change the content of CPU registers, to read\write the RAM memory and to flash\erase the NVM memory of the microcontroller. The main purpose of a debugger is to ...
Since I have started to hold seminars and hands-on to newbie developers and engineering students, one of the most controversial things people don’t get used to is the debugging. Many of them often confuse between a bootloader and an on-chip debugger because both are used to test the firmware ...
This article contains some simple examples to understand how to print escaped strings when you are approaching STM32 and ChibiOS. Escaped strings are very useful while developing because you can use them to print data while the application is running. Strings are widely used for debugging ...
This article contains some simple examples to understand how to deal with push-buttons when you are approaching STM32 and ChibiOS. The button can be considered the simplest input peripheral that can be connected to a microcontroller. Because of that, usually, every embedded development board is ...
This article includes some simple examples to understand how to deal with LEDs when you are approaching STM32 and ChibiOS. The LED can be considered the simplest peripheral output you can connect to a microcontroller. Because of that, usually, every embedded development board is equipped with a ...
The Inter-Integrated Circuit (often shored as I2C or I2C bus pronounced I-squared-C or alternatively I-two-C) is a widely used synchronous serial communication peripheral which communicates in half duplex mode using a multi-master-multi-slave architecture.
Like the SPI, the I2C is a Synchronous ...
The Serial Peripheral Interface (often shored as SPI bus) is a widely used synchronous serial communication peripheral which communicates in full duplex mode using a master-slave architecture with a single master.
As the SPI is a Synchronous Serial bus, a clock signal is generated by one of the ...
The Pulse Width Modulation (also known as PWM) is a digital modulation technique which uses duty-cycle of square waves to encode information. In communication field PWM surrendered to more advanced communication technique which uses more complex waveforms showing better noise rejection ratio ...
A microcontroller is a system which works on bits and bitstreams more than analog signals, anyway, those signals are still widely used in many fields especially in audio and power applications. An Analog to Digital Converter (or ADC) is a system that converts such kind of signals in a sequence ...
The C programming language is clearly an imperative programming language not designed to be object-oriented. Anyway, the object-oriented approach remains something much more related to the design and mindset more than to syntax. The ChibiOS/HAL is an Hardware Abstraction Layer which design ...
The serial communication in asynchronous mode is one of the simplest and most used methods to exchange data between a microcontroller and other devices. Such kind of communication can be achieved through a Universal Synchronous/Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (or USART) as well ...