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The 2024 Embedded Online Conference

Make Your Own MCU Boards (2023 Teardown Conference)

Nathan Jones March 7, 2024

Ditch the development boards! Products like the Nucleo development boards serve a wonderful purpose, but they’re ill-suited for projects that need to be small and cheap, such as hobby projects or products just beginning a production run. In this talk (a recording from the 2023 Teardown Conference), you’ll learn how to put a microcontroller or other custom circuit on a PCB a little larger than a stick of gum for less than $3 a board.


Creating a GPIO HAL and Driver in C

Jacob Beningo February 28, 2024

Creating a GPIO Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) in C allows for flexible microcontroller interfacing, overcoming the challenge of variability across silicon vendors. This method involves reviewing datasheets, identifying features, designing interfaces, and iterative development, as detailed in the "Reusable Firmware" process. A simplified approach prioritizes essential functions like initialization and read/write operations, showcased through a minimal interface example. The post also highlights the use of AI to expedite HAL generation. A detailed GPIO HAL version is provided, featuring extended capabilities and facilitating driver connection through direct assignments or wrappers. The significance of a configuration table for adaptable peripheral setup is emphasized. Ultimately, the blog illustrates the ease and scalability of developing a GPIO HAL and driver in C, promoting hardware-independent and extensible code for various interfaces, such as SPI, I2C, PWM, and timers, underscoring the abstraction benefits.


Software is free and can right any wrong

Colin Walls October 26, 2023

Software changes are so much easier than hardware modifications, so the temptation is always to take this approach to fixing bugs. This may not always be a good idea.


3 Overlooked Embedded Software Elements

Jacob Beningo July 9, 20224 comments

Have you ever wondered, while you and your team are busy writing software if the foundation of how embedded software systems are built has changed and left you in the dust? What if while you were busily focusing on getting your product out the door, fighting bugs, and dealing with supply issues, there were techniques and processes that you completely overlooked that could save the day? I’ve found three elements embedded software teams often underutilize that could dramatically improve...


VolksEEG Project: Initial Hardware Architecture

Steve Branam November 2, 20211 comment

The initial hardware architecture for the prototype VolksEEG uses an Adafruit Feather nRF52840 Sense, which connects to a PC via USB for UI (User Interface). Through several additional chips, this provides power to and acquires data from the ADS1299 ADC.

An important topic I mentioned in my introduction to the project is isolation, ensuring there is no conductive path for current through the patient. The architecture is therefore split into...


Introducing The VolksEEG Project

Steve Branam October 31, 2021
Introduction

The VolksEEG project is an open-source project with the goal of creating an electroenchephalogram (EEG) machine, fully cleared by the FDA for standard clinical use. All designs will be freely available for others to manufacture.

The project was founded by Alan Cohen, a medical device systems engineer with an electrical engineering/software (EE/SW) background in Boston, USA, and Dr. Bryan Glezerson


Review: Prototype to Product

Steve Branam October 16, 2021

Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market, by Alan Cohen, is a must-read for anyone involved in product development, whether in a technical, management, or executive role.

I was reminded of it by Cohen's recent episode on Embedded.fm, 388: Brains Generate EMF, which is worth listening to a couple times through, especially if you're interested in medical device development. And in fact his first episode there, 


Off the shelf availability of Custom IoT Gateway

Prasan Dutt May 12, 2019

Any IoT implementation requires a gateway. Since most industrial gateways comes at a price above average, choosing a right gateway for your new IoT requirement could be a daunting task. With the advancement in IIoT, several segments of industry use cases are popping up and each with their unique requirements. For example, condition monitoring of a thermal power plant, predictive maintenance of factory heavy machinery and asset tracking of containers in a shipping yard etc. Every such...


Metal detection: building the detector

Fabien Le Mentec February 6, 20164 comments
IntroductionBefore starting, you may want to read this post describing the BFO stage:

//www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/911.php

I have detailed the implementation of a BFO stage for detecting metal. Now it has been validated on the bench, the next step is to integrate it in a stand alone instrument for testing on the field. A few things have to be done to reach this goal:

  • make a PCB for the electronics,
  • house the PCB in a box,
  • add a power supply,
  • make a frame to hold...

VHDL tutorial - A practical example - part 3 - VHDL testbench

Gene Breniman June 25, 20118 comments

In part 1 of this series we focused on the hardware design, including some of the VHDL definitions of the I/O characteristics of the CPLD part.  In part 2, we described the VHDL logic of the CPLD for this design.  In part 3, we will show the entire VHDL design and the associated tests used to prove that we have, in fact, designed what we started out to design.

First, let's pull all of the pieces of the prior design together into a...


Using the Beaglebone PRU to achieve realtime at low cost

Fabien Le Mentec April 25, 20148 comments
Introduction

I work as an engineer in a synchrotron facility. A few weeks ago, I helped the people in charge of the power supply developments to integrate a realtime control algorithm on a prototype platform: a BeagleBone Black (BBB) running Linux. I had already worked with this board in the past, and I found it very interesting given its excellent resources versus price ratio (around 40 euros). This time, I was impressed by its realtime capabilities. I thought it would be a good idea to...


VHDL tutorial - A practical example - part 2 - VHDL coding

Gene Breniman May 27, 2011

In part 1 of this series we focused on the hardware design, including some of the VHDL definitions of the I/O characteristics of the CPLD part.  In part 2, we will describe the VHDL logic of the CPLD for this design.

With any design, the first step to gather the requirements for the job at hand.  From part 1 of this article, I have copied two sections that address some of the requirements for the CPLD design.

The data acquisition engine has the...


VHDL tutorial - A practical example - part 1 - Hardware

Gene Breniman May 18, 20111 comment

In previous posts I described some simple VHDL examples.  This time let's try something a little more complex. This is part one of a multiple part article.  This is intended to be a detailed description of one of several initial designs that I developed for a client.  This design never made it into a product, but a similar design was used and is currently being produced.  As a considerable amount of work was put into this effort, I decided to share this design...


OOKLONE: a cheap RF 433.92MHz OOK frame cloner

Fabien Le Mentec August 12, 201417 comments
Introduction

A few weeks ago, I bought a set of cheap wireless outlets and reimplemented the protocol for further inclusion in a domotics platform. I wrote a post about it here:

//www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/620.php

Following that, I had access to another outlet from a different vendor:

http://www.castorama.fr/store/Prise-telecommandee-BLYSS---Interieur-prod4470027.html

The device documentation mentions that it operates on the same frequency as the previous...


Using XML to describe embedded devices (and speak to them)

Martin Strubel October 12, 20111 comment

This article discusses one of the typical development cycles in embedded device and communication design and presents a possible, light weight solution using the free DClib/netpp framework.

The challenge

Assume we're faced with the design of an embedded device, be it a simple SoC unit or a more complex, uC controlled engine with various attached peripherals. From first prototype to the market, the following development cycle is typically walked through:


A wireless door monitor based on the BANO framework

Fabien Le Mentec June 10, 20145 comments
Introduction

I have been thinking for a while about a system to monitor the states of my flat and my garage doors from a remote place. Functionnaly, I wanted to monitor the state of my doors from a remote place. A typical situation is when I leave for holidays, but it can also be useful from the work office. To do so, I would centralize the information on a server connected on the Internet that I could query using a web browser. The server itself would be located in the appartement, where...


Basic hand tools for electronics assembly

Ed Nutter November 20, 20153 comments

Though the software tools vary with different microcontrollers, many hardware tools are the same.


First Steps in OrCAD 16 [Capture]

Dr. Maykel Alonso June 1, 20127 comments

Hello community, I know that in last posts I have been writting about the Software. But what about Hardware? In last months I have been dealing with it, exactly with OrCAD 16. And I will explain how to build a PCB  in 2 articles. For begginers could be a good and easy guide.

This article explains the part for the designing of the schematic, and in the next one which i will explain the layout part.

The first stuff you must known about OrCAD is that it is not an unique tool for...


Improving the Reload2 active load

Fabien Le Mentec April 23, 2015
Introduction

With another colleague at work, we are currently developing an electronic board that will eventually be powered over Ethernet. To gain more experience with this technology, we prototyped a standalone power supply stage.

We want to test this stage with different load profiles. While we already have professional grade active loads at work, I had previously read about the Reload2 product from Arachnidlabs, a low cost active load sold on Hackaday:


The 2024 Embedded Online Conference