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!
The founders
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 ...
HC-SR04 is a commonly used ultrasonic sensor which is capable to detect obstacles in a range of 2-300cm. The sensor looks like a small PCB having two metal cylinders on the front-side and a small circuit on the back-side (see Fig.1).
In this article we will provide a simple demo to use ...
The HD44780 is a de-facto standard controller for display. We have already use it providing a source code to use a 16×2 LCD with a STM32. In this article we will step over introducing an I2C backpack for that display. Of course we will explain how to edit old code in order to get it work with ...
First time I started to deal with a software a little bit more complicated than the one used to print “Hello World”, I have encountered some words like “versioning”, “revision”, “diff”, “branch”, “trunk”, “checkout” and I heard about certain software like “svn”, “git”, “mercurial”.
Do you keep ...
In the article “A close look to ChibiOS demos for STM32” we have briefly explained how multithreading works but in this article we want to discuss more in detail the mechanisms behind ChibiOS/RT. This article is addressed to those developers already experienced with this RTOS.
A single thread ...
In this article we will resume the topic started with in “Detecting obstacle with IR Sensor and Arduino”. More in details, we are going to use the IR sensor like an objects counter.
The counter application is often used for:
BUZZ Click is a click board with a mikroBus form factor. It is substantially composed of a piezoelectric speaker having a resonant frequency at 3.8 kHz: this means we should expect best performances at this frequency. Let’s take a look to the principle of operation of DC and AC buzzer.
A ...
In this tutorial we are going to see how to connect a STLink v2 debugger to a Clicker 2 for STM32 enabling users to do debugging which could be very useful in development phases. A debugger is a computer program which is used to test and debug another program usually named Target.
In embedded ...
An object can be detected with an infrared system consisting of an infrared transmitter and a receiver. More in detail an IR transmitter, also known as IR LED, sends an infrared signal with a certain frequency compatible with an IR receiver which has the task to detect it. There are different ...
The Clicker 2 for STM32 is a compact development kit by mikroe (also known as MikroElektronika). This board is equipped with 2 mikroBUS socket that allow to connect the Click Boards. These boards, designed by mikroe, are small add-ons that allow to easily connect most common devices to your ...
In the past, building OpenOCD on Windows was a complicated process due to its numerous dependencies and lack of availability on the Windows platform. Fortunately, with MSYS2, building OpenOCD has become a simple task. For those who require the latest stable version of OpenOCD on MSYS2, it is ...