On optimizing manual soldering
When faced with manual soldering of thousands of components, speed and efficiency become pivotal. Here are some takeaways from my own experience attempting to optimize such a process.
On hardware state machines: How to write a simple MAC controller using the RP2040 PIOs
Hardware state machines are nice, and the RP2040 has two blocks with up to four machines each. Their instruction set is limited, but powerful, and they can execute an instruction per cycle, pushing and popping from their FIFOs and shifting bytes in and out. The Raspberry Pi Pico does not have an Ethernet connection, but there are many PHY boards available… take a LAN8720 board and connect it to the Pico; you’re done. The firmware ? Introducing Mongoose…
Graphical medicine
Although an appealing user interface is a good option for any device, in medical applications it can be a life saver.
Pay it Forward
A popular car bumper sticker reads, "If you can read this, thank a teacher!" I might say, "If you can read THIS (article on Embedded Related), then you've been blessed with great experiences and/or great educators or volunteers that got you excited about tech and helped you believe that you had a future in this field!" Why not pay it forward by helping other children have those same great experiences? As we enter another season of giving, I hope you consider doing what you can to support the hundreds or thousands of non-profit organizations, educators, and volunteers around the world who are getting kids excited about tech the same way YOU got excited about tech. In this article, I'll share with you a handful of organizations that I know of or donate to that have this mission. How do you like to give back?
Zephyr: West Manifest For Application Development
In this blog post, I show a simpler way to create custom West manifest files. This technique eliminates the need to duplicate the complex West manifest from upstream Zephyr. I also show how we can use the West manifest to include out-of-tree board and SoC definitions, and include our own out-of-tree drivers.
Simulating Your Embedded Project on Your Computer (Part 2)
Having a simulation of your embedded project is like having a superpower that improves the quality and pace of your development ten times over! To be useful, though, it can't take longer to develop the simulation than it takes to develop the application code and for many simulation techniques "the juice isn't worth the squeeze"! In the last article, I showed you how to use the terminal (i.e. printf/getchar) to easily make a completely functional simulation. In this article, we'll take simulation to the next level, either in terms of realism (by using virtual hardware) or in terms of user experience (by using a GUI to simulate our hardware, instead of using the terminal).
In TCL FPGA Wizards Trust
In TCL FPGA wizards trust. The best way to learn TCL is exposure therapy which we will be doing here using two examples: One for creation of a project with synthesis and implementation steps and another for simulation.
How to Estimate Encoder Velocity Without Making Stupid Mistakes: Part II (Tracking Loops and PLLs)
Yeeehah! Finally we're ready to tackle some more clever ways to figure out the velocity of a position encoder. In part I, we looked at the basics of velocity estimation. Then in my last article, I talked a little about what's necessary to...
VHDL tutorial - A practical example - part 2 - VHDL coding
[quicklinks]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...
How to Estimate Encoder Velocity Without Making Stupid Mistakes: Part I
Here's a common problem: you have a quadrature encoder to measure the angular position of a motor, and you want to know both the position and the velocity. How do you do it? Some people do it poorly -- this article is how not to be one of...
MSP430 LaunchPad Tutorial - Part 4 - UART Transmission
Today we are going to learn how to communicate using UART with the Launchpad. For this purpose I will replace the default microcontroller that comes with the board with the MSP430G2553. It is the most powerful device in the MSP430 Value Line and...
Introduction to Microcontrollers - Beginnings
Welcome to this Introduction to Microcontroller Programming tutorial series. If you are looking to learn the basics of embedded programming for microcontrollers (and a bit of embedded hardware design as well), I hope these tutorials will help you...
You Don't Need an RTOS (Part 3)
In this third article I'll share with you a few cooperative schedulers (with a mix of both free and commercial licenses) that implement a few of the OS primitives that the "Superduperloop" is currently missing, possibly giving you a ready-to-go solution for your system. On the other hand, I don't think it's all that hard to add thread flags, binary and counting semaphores, event flags, mailboxes/queues, a simple Observer pattern, and something I call a "marquee" to the "Superduperloop"; I'll show you how to do that in the second half of this article and the next. Although it will take a little more work than just using one of the projects above, it will give you the maximum amount of control over your system and it will let you write tasks in ways you could only dream of using an RTOS or other off-the-shelf system.
Getting Started With Zephyr: Bluetooth Low Energy
In this blog post, I show how to enable BLE support in a Zephyr application. First, I show the necessary configuration options in Kconfig. Then, I show how to use the Zephyr functions and macros to create a custom service and characteristic for a contrived application.
Getting Started With Zephyr: West Manifest Customization
Introduction The Zephyr Project RTOS (https://zephyrproject.org/), or simply “Zephyr” as it is known colloquially, is an increasingly popular real-time operating system due to its native support for over 450 boards and countless peripherals....
How to Build a Fixed-Point PI Controller That Just Works: Part I
This two-part article explains five tips to make a fixed-point PI controller work well. I am not going to talk about loop tuning -- there are hundreds of articles and books about that; any control-systems course will go over loop tuning enough to...
