STM32 F4 Discovery tutorial using open source tools

[Pulko Mandy] got his hands on the new STM32 F3 Discovery board. He’s a fan of the open source tools just like we are, so he posted a guide covering the use of an open source toolchain with the F3 hardware.

This board was just announced earlier this month but there is already support for it in OpenOCD. It’s … Read the rest

Regarding the development files that accompany TI’s microcontroller offerings

We received a tip from [Fabien] that Texas Instruments had posted a set of IDEs for the Stellaris Launchpad on their download page. At first we skipped right over the link, but then decided to take a look and see if things had changed any since the MSP430 Launchpad had been released. As we expected, there’s really no help on … Read the rest

Parallax shows love for open source: GCC + Propeller

Parallax has done something that is unthinkable for most microcontroller manufacturing companies. They’ve decided to throw their support behind an open source toolchain based on GCC. That’s right, instead of fighting to get your code compiling on a platform whose example code uses crippleware, you can actually download, compile, and start using this toolchain without code size restrictions or … Read the rest

HTML based AVR compiler aims to make Arduino development on iOS possible

It’s surprising what lengths people will go to in order to bring functionality to their smart phones. In this case, [Tadpol] wanted a way to develop for his Arduino on an iOS device like an iPad or iPhone. He figures it’s possible to rewrite the IDE as HTML5, but since that’s a pretty large mountain to climb, he started by Read the rest

Visualizing a nanosecond

We’re so glad to have run across this video where [Rear Admiral Grace Hopper] explains how to visualize a nanosecond. Now we had never heard of [Grace Hopper] before, but once you watch the clip (also embedded after the break) you’ll want to know who this person is. We work with divisions of seconds all the time when developing … Read the rest

How Canonical automates Linux package compilation

pandaboard

What do you do when it’s time to port the most popular Linux distribution to a completely different architecture? Canonical employee [David Mandalla] works on their ARM development team and recently shared the answer to that question with his fellow Dallas Makerspace members.

Canonical needed a way to compile about 20,000+ packages for the ARM platform, however they did … Read the rest

AVR Programming 02: The Hardware

You may be able to write the most eloquent code in the history of embedded systems but without a way to run it on the hardware it will be worthless. In this installment of the tutorial series we will:

  • Look at some of the available AVR programmer options
  • Place the microcontroller on a breadboard and connect it to a power

Read the rest