ChibiOS
ChibiOS/RT is a compact and fast real-time operating system supporting multiple architectures and released under the GPL3 license. ChibiOS/RT is designed for embedded applications on 8, 16 and 32 bit microcontrollers; size and execution efficiency are the main project goals. As reference, the kernel size can range from a minimum of 1.2Kib up to a maximum of 5.5KiB with all the subsystems activated on a STM32 Cortex-M3 processor. [Read more…]
In this article, we are going to set-up a ready-to-use Eclipse-based toolchain named ChibiStudio for the development on STM32. We will also explore this development toolchain explaining some basic operations necessary for daily development. So we will introduce the ChibiOS project, we will setup ChibiStudio taking a tour of some parts of it, we will import some ready to use projects and perform our first flash and run. Note that to proceed with this tutorial is necessary the installation of ST-Link drivers: this procedure has been shown in the previous article From 0 to continue reading...
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 HC-SR04. This requires a preliminary read of the sensor user manual:
HC-SR04 User Manual
The sensor has 4 PIN:
VCC, which must be connected to 5V;
Trig, which is an input PIN to trigger the measurement;
Echo, which is an output PIN which sent out a square wave;
GND, which must be
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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 this new hardware configuration.
Even if it is still popular, this controller was made commercially available in the late eighties. At that time serial communications were not so widespread because their were costly and involved constraint about clock speed. Because of that, the continue reading...
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 mind when your friends knows something you don’t know and they continuously talk about that making you feel like a complete dumbass? Well that was my feeling! It is much simpler than how it seems: there are certain programs which purpose is to keep trace of every single character continue reading...
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 piezoelectric loudspeaker also known as buzzer uses the inverse piezoelectric effect for generating sound. The piezoelectricity is a phenomena where mechanical stress produces the accumulation of electrical charges and then a voltage across the material. The inverse principle is true continue reading...
