ARM powered rack mount USB test equipment

developing-rack-mount-pcb-testing-tools

This is a device which [Limpkin] has been developing at his day job. It's a high-speed testing interface for use with Physics experiments. We find it interesting because it uses an ARM microcontroller to implement CDC and MSD over USB. The design is in two parts to make it work in a rack-mount situation. That big white connector allows cards to be swapped out. You can see the board on the right … [Read more...]

Building an ARM cross compiler on OSX

arm-cross-compiler-for-osx

We've tried building our own ARM cross compiler on a Linux box and it's no picnic. Luckily there is a free cross compiling toolchain available through Mentor Graphics (formerly called Code Sourcery G++). But those looking to develop on a Mac aren't so lucky. There is help via a script, and [Michael] wrote a guide detailing how to use crosstool-ng to build an ARM toolchain on Mountain … [Read more...]

Hola! From a Spanish Speaking Drawing Arm

drawing-robot

[Acorv] wrote in to tell us about his latest hack, a robotic arm that writes with a marker. In the video after the break, the arm is set to copy whatever someone writes in a touchpad. As you might guess from this video, the hack is written up in Spanish, but it's nothing your favorite translator can't handle if you don't speak the language. This robot it the result of improvements on his first … [Read more...]

Netduino gets a huge upgrade

netduino

The Netduino, a dev board built around the .NET Micro framework with the goal of being compatible with Arduino shields just got a huge upgrade. The new Netduino Plus 2 features an upgraded STM32 ARM Cortex-M4 uC running at 168 MHz, improving on the original Netduino's ARM7 running at 47 MHz. In addition to some more processing power, the STM32-based microcontroller has twice the RAM and six … [Read more...]

Developing with eBay-sourced ARM + LCD dev boards

TFT

eBay isn't only about counterfeit designer handbags and boxes of all-marshmallow Lucky Charms, sometimes there's actually something useful for sale. [Matt] found a bunch of Chinese-made ARM development boards with integrated LCD displays on the 'bay, but without a reliable toolchain, these boards - as cool as they are - are nearly useless. Thankfully, he figured out how to do something with these … [Read more...]

Turning a 600 mil chip to 300 mil

ARM

We've seen a few builds featuring NXP's LPC1114 microcontroller before. This chip - the only breadboard friendly ARM microcontroller available - comes in a 'still a little too large for prototyping' 600 mil, 28 pin package. We won't hazard a guess why NXP chose this rather large package, but the good news is it's possible to shave this chip down to the more common 300 mil, 28-pin package used by … [Read more...]

Rasperry Pi: Now mostly open source

If you've been following the developments of building Android, Chromium, and other OSes for the Raspberry Pi, you'll come across a common theme. The drivers for the Raspi's chip are closed source and protected by Broadcom with an NDA. This limits the ability of devs to take on projects that involve messing around deep inside the CPU. Today, this is no longer the case. The CPU on the Raspberry … [Read more...]