Copper » Powerhouse Electronics

Running FreeRTOS Demo within TrueSTUDIO

Copper, EPS - Electric Power Steering 11 Responses »

Jan 062012

Atollic TrueSTUDIO Lite

This posting is how-to for getting FreeRTOS running inside of TrueSTUDIO using my demo code.

My TrueSTUDIO installation is goofy because I’m running TrueSTUDIO inside a VMWare virtual Windows XP machine. My host machine is Ubuntu 11.xx and I can report the STM32F4 Discovery board USB drivers, passing through to VMWare / Windows, and work just fine. With this setup, I can do all my editing using GVim on the Linux side and my compiling and debug on the Windows side. Strange but true – works for me.

So, to straiten out the project setting takes just a couple of changes. No big deal. The jpg images below should be all you needed to setup the project on your machine, however you have your machine setup. Continue reading »

STM32F4 + FreeRTOS + TRUEStudio = Awesome-O

Copper, EPS - Electric Power Steering 8 Responses »

Jan 052012

STM32F4 Discovery

ST Micro really gave the world a nice Holiday present this year by releasing the STM32F4 Discovery board! You can get yours at Mouser for $16.25. An amazing dev. board for $16.25.

32-bit ARM Cortex-M4F Core
1MB Flash, 192KB RAM
FPU (Float Point Unit), 16-Channel DMA
Ethernet MAC 10/100
USB 2.0 OTG HS/FS
6x UART (LIN, Strtacard, IrDA)
3x SPI, 2x I2S, 3x I2C, 2x CAN 2.0 B
3x 12Bit ADC (24 Channels 2.44MSPS), 2x 2-Channel 12-Bit DAC
2x 16-Bit Motor Control PWM, 10x 16-Bit Timers, 2x 32-Bit Timers

Discovery Board Extras:

ST MEMS motion sensor (LIS302DL 3-axis digital accelerometer)
ST MEMS audio sensor (MP45DT02 omni-directional digital microphone)
Audio DAC with integrated class D speaker driver (CS43L22)

mBed / AX-12A Servo Motor Hacking

Copper No Responses »

Jun 032011

AX-12A

Based on a project I have in mind I started playing around with the AX-12A servo motor from Robotis (a Japanese company). The AX-12A is a newer version of the old AX-12+ servo motor. It’s my understanding that the 12A is just a redesign of the plastics – the electronics are the same between the two versions. Still, the naming the new version 12A is confusing to this English speaker. Should have called the new version “++”.

Anyway, below is stuff about connecting a AX-12+ to your mbed development board. Continue reading »

Final LCD Project

Copper No Responses »

Apr 132011

Well, I had big plan for this LCD thing. After many many hours I’m calling Uncle! I give. The plan was to have this blue LCD floating on a wire stalk above the STM32 Discover board. There is just one problem, the display is almost translucent so things behind the display make it hard to see what’s being display on the screen. What’s needed is a white background – preferably a background that is also generating light. You know, a LED back-light.

For more on the LCD hardware have a look at this link where I covered info about the display.

Another Copper LCD

Copper No Responses »

Mar 062011

The Sparkfun LCD is OK – but, it seems really old (surplus). So, I went looking for something new (but similar). Ultimately, I found something interesting at Mouser from a company called Electronic Assembly. Seems they have taken a COG (chip on glass) display and fused PCB legs onto it. The price also helped – only $12 bucks. The displays are monochrome and have a graphic format of 102×64 pixels. The displays are designed to interface to a micro using a SPI bus. Note, these version of displays that use a SPI interface are read only. The display has no MISO pin to allow the display to be read. The Sparkfun / Nokia 5110 display was the same – no MISO pin.