Welcome to PLAY Embedded, the go-to place for embedded systems enthusiasts! Since 2015, we have been dedicated to helping you learn, create, and innovate in this exciting field. Our wide range of articles, tutorials, and resources will support your journey into embedded systems. Our goal is to build a lively community of like-minded individuals who learn together, share experiences, and contribute to the field's growth. We aim to nurture future embedded systems engineers and professionals with our accessible and engaging content.
We know learning complex subjects can be tough. That is why our articles break down embedded systems concepts into easy-to-understand pieces. We cover topics from basic concepts and programming languages to hardware platforms and hands-on projects. At PLAY Embedded, we focus on Free and Open Source projects like ChibiOS. Our ad-free blog is a labor of love, created in our spare time without any financial interest. We value your feedback and suggestions, so don't hesitate to get in touch with us or join our community on LinkedIn.
Below you will find our latest articles. If you are new here, we recommend checking out our How to Start guide to begin your embedded systems journey. Don't forget to have fun!
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This article is a step-by-step guide showing how to reliably flash and run a project in ChibiStudio.
In this article we are going to see how to setup ChibiStudio, an Eclipse-based toolchain that conveniently helps to develop embedded firmware for different microcontroller families.
We are going to install ChibiStudio for Windows 2022-01 but the user should always pick the latest version ...
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. Looking back at the list, it was so detailed I start to think about an article to share this experience and enable everyone to assemble their own ...
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 ...
Debugging can be a challenging task for many new developers and engineering students. In my experience leading seminars and hands-on sessions, I have found that one of the most common points of confusion is the distinction between a bootloader and an on-chip debugger. Both of these tools are ...
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 ...