Followers of this blog will know that I have an interest in the whole ecosystem of Raspberry Pi “compatible” boards. By now I have quite a selection. Mostly, the boards I have in my collection are ARM-based, often using a System-on-Chip (SOC) from AllWinner rather than the Broadcom devices used by the official Raspberry Pi …
My previous post ended with me waiting for delivery of a surface-mount SWD connector so I could turn a Freescale Kinetis KwikStik K40 into a Segger J-Link compatible debug probe. I placed an order with Farnell UK for an appropriate connector, and it arrived the next day. Soldering the connector was surprisingly difficult. I had …
Although I had some success with using the Segger firmware on a Freescale FRDM board to program a KE04 microcontroller on a header board recently, I was very aware that I was being naughty. The terms of use for the Segger firmware make it clear that it is only for programming and debugging genuine Freescale …
If you have read my previous post in this series, you’ll know that I had mixed feelings about the LPC810 and LPC812 chips from NXP. They are certainly simple and flexible in use, but without a stable and predictable technique to program them I just ended up more frustrated. However, I impressed myself by successfully …
Continue reading ‘ARM Cortex-M board from scratch part 3: Kinetis KE04’ »
As I mentioned in my previous post in this series, I have been planning for a long time to make my own ARM Cortex development board from scratch. After a lot of mulling around, and a bit of a false start with the LPC1114 chip, I discovered JeeLabs, a comprehensive web site, blog and upcoming …
Continue reading ‘ARM Cortex-M board from scratch part 2: LPC810’ »
As many of my readers will be aware, I have quite an extensive collection of microcontroller development boards with a wide range of controller chips from a variety of architectures and manufacturers. While it’s fair to say that I enjoy programming and creating projects with these boards, there has always been a niggle in the …
Continue reading ‘ARM Cortex-M board from scratch part 1: Too Many Options’ »
Over the last few years I have written and edited many Arduino sketches. Aside from a brief dalliance with Sublime Text I have exclusively used the dull but ubiquitous Arduino IDE. At the time I started each project this seemed completely natural, but over time I seem to somehow lose track of where I put …
Just in case you have not noticed the hype that is all over our corner of the internet, there is a new version of the Raspberry Pi, called the “B+”. I won’t bother going into detail about its features, that’s covered very well by many others including Adafruit, Gordon Henderson, Carrie-Ann Philbin and, of course, …
I’ve not blogged here for a few days. Unfortunately my “real job” got very busy. In the meanwhile I received another package of bits I had ordered from China weeks ago and mostly forgotten about ;) Among other things in this package were some clone Arduino Mini Pro boards. These little boards have a SMD …
Continue reading ‘Arduino Mini Pro and ultrasonic distance sensor’ »
You’d think I would be fed up with Arduinos after all that messing about with one connected to a Raspberry Pi, but while playing with that it occurred to me that some months ago I had bought a nicely cheap Arduino board kit (Xino Basic for Atmel), assembled it, but not managed to program it, …