Valentine’s puzzle box makes you work for what’s inside

valentines-puzzle-box

Here's a new take on a gift box which has been locked from the inside. I doesn't rely on GPS coordinates or a real-time clock to unfasten the latch. Instead, the box itself acts as a puzzle. You follow the visual and audio clues, turning the box along three axes in order to input the unlock code. There are three different difficulty settings. The easiest uses the LED heart to indicate which … [Read more...]

Reverse engineering ST-Link/V2 firmware

reverse-engineering-stlink-v2

The chip seen just above the center of this image is an ARM Cortex-M3. It provides the ability to interface and program the main chip on the STM32F3 Discovery board. The protocol used is the ST-Link/V2 which has become the standard for ST Microelectronics development boards. The thing is, that big ARM chip near the bottom of the image has multiple UARTs and bridging a couple of solder points will … [Read more...]

A JavaScript interpreter for ARM ‘micros

js

When programming a microcontroller to do your bidding, you only have two choices. You could write your code in a proper language such as C and cross-compile your source into a piece of firmware easily understood by a micro. Alternatively, your could load an interpreter on your microcontroller and write code via a serial connection. Interpreters are a really fast and easy method to dig in to the … [Read more...]

STM32 F3 Discovery dev board includes some extras

STM32F3_discovery_kit

ST Microelectronics keeps kicking out development boards to show off their new ARM processor line. Yesterday they issued a press release announcing the STM32 F3 Discovery Board. As their naming scheme implies, this carries an ARM Cortex-M3 processor, but compared to the F0 Discovery board (which we loved) it's got several extra goodies built into it. We took a look at the F3 Discovery product … [Read more...]