ChibiOS and STM32
ChibiOS is a compact and fast real-time operating system supporting multiple architectures. It offers a multi-threading scheduler and related APIs to manage threads scheduling and priorities, events and inter-thread communication. It also provide an Hardware Abstraction Layer.
STM32 is a broad family of 32-bit microcontrollers based on ARM Cortex-M architecture. With hundreds of different chips, STM32 covers a broad range of applications. Thanks to cheap and valuable development kits it is quite easy to evaluate them or create an prototype.
No matter what they say, you will not be able to appreciate the performance of these MCUs without a good scheduler. Here we will provide resources to getting started with STM32 development board using ChibiOS/RT as kernel and ChibiOS/HAL as drivers. Pick one and read it! If you like it don’t forget to Share the knowledge.
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 discover and fix anomalies in the functional behavior of our firmware.
Anyway, there is no silver bullet: it requires some time to master the debugger learning some tricks. As usual, the time spent learning how to debug could make your day: it will reduce the effort required to develop continue reading...
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 purposes when a debugger is not available but this is not the case.
Every STM32 development kit is equipped with a STLink debugger. Starting from STLink V2-1, the debugger offers a virtual COM port and, in this article, we are going to use this feature to print data avoiding to put continue reading...
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 equipped with a button marked as “User Button” and this means it is actually connected to a GPIO pin you can read via software.
To understand this article with proficiency, you should match few requirements:
You should have an STM32 development kit and be able to do basic stuff
continue reading...
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 LED marked as “User LED” and this means that it is actually connected to a GPIO pin you can drive via software.
To understand this article with proficiency you should match few requirements:
You should have an STM32 development kit and be able to do basic stuff with ChibiStudio
continue reading...
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 Serial bus, and the clock signal is generated by one of the endpoint and provided to the others through a specific Serial Clock Line often shorted as SCL by a party which is named Master.
In half-duplex buses, the communication happens on the same line no matter the direction. The continue reading...
