ARM Prototyping On-the-cheap With STM32 Discovery

October 12, 2010 by Mike Szczys 50 Comments

STMicroelectronics has another inexpensive development board out; the STM32 Discovery is an ARM Cortex-M3 prototyping platform. Coming in under $10 puts it right along the lines of their 8-bit offering, but this one is 32-bits with 5 KB of RAM and 128 KB of programming memory. It runs a bootloader and has on-board USB for easy programming. They’ve even got a trio of crippled IDE’s to get you started.

Unfortunately this is following a growing trend with the exclusion of Linux support. [Gordon] wrote in to let us know that there is hope in a couple of forms (but not using the USB functionality). The first is a serial programmer using the RS232 that [Paul] came up with (there’s a lot more on his blog so spend some time there). But you can also use the serial debug protocol to program the board.

Either way you’ll still need a method of compiling the code. We’ve had great success rolling our own GNU ARM cross compiler using this guide. Or you can grab a pre-built package by downloading Sourcery G++ lite.

Battle Cars

April 30, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 41 Comments

car1

There’s a new show coming to the Discovery Chanel called Weaponizers. Brought to you by the same people who brought you Mythbusters, this show centers around weaponizing and remote controlling cars. They’ll be building them with several different types of competition in mind, including defense of an object and all out warfare. You’ll note in the press release that they keep mentioning their special effects backgrounds. Judging by the picture above, we should expect to see them shooting lots of fireworks, maybe some flame throwers thrown in. Generally, we think we’ll see lots of flashy stuff that really isn’t effective at destroying an unmanned car. They do mention live ammunition, so maybe they’ll actually try to make these things able to harm each other. Let’s hope they don’t let us down.

Prototype This Schematics Posted

October 16, 2008 by Eliot 26 Comments

As promised, [Joe Grand] has uploaded the schematics from his part of last night’s episode of Prototype This. The device monitors the driver of a demo derby car and shuts it off if he becomes too enraged. He’ll be posting schematics for every episode as they’re released. The really interesting thing is that he scanned all of his development notes too. If you missed the episode, you can watch it on Discovery’s site. You can also grab a version that doesn’t idiotically force you to watch in full screen browser window from The Pirate Bay.

UPDATE: [Joe] has been responding to your comments.