Text Editor Running On Your ARM Project

bare-metal-elua-text-editor

Tired of flashing your embedded project over and over just to tweak a few values? So was [Karl], so he wrote a text editor that runs on his ARM dev board.

Having trouble wrapping your mind around the need for this kind of thing? He’s actually playing around with eLua, the embedded version of the Lua programming language. In this case the program files are being stored on an SD card. But still, moving that back and forth between computer and embedded project gets old quickly. So he invested the time to write a rudimentary text editor that he interfaces through this terminal window. Above you can see the help screen which lays out all of the applications features. Right now it sounds like the only gotcha for this is the amount of RAM it needs to run. As it stands, the editor will now work an mbed board, but it works just fine on an STM Discovery.

Animating A Lamp With The Leap Motion

leap

The Leap Motion is a very cool device, but so far we haven’t seen many applications of interacting with physical devices. [Xavier] wanted to control a cute servo animated desk lamp with his hands, and with the help of a Leap and an Arduino he was able to do just that.

The Leap Motion API has a handy feature that will output all its data over a websocket. It’s a very easy way to transfer hand positions with a minimum amount of overhead, and with just a little bit of Node.js, it’s only two lines of code to connect the Leap to a websocket server.

With the Leap data on a web server, the only thing left to do is pulling it down to an Arduino. Again, [Xavier] used Node.js, this time in the form of johnny five, a Javascript-based Arduino framework. After that, it was a simple matter of mapping the data from the Leap to servo movements in [Xavier]’s Pixar-inspired lamp.

Video of the build below.

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