Running FreeRTOS Demo within TrueSTUDIO

Copper, EPS - Electric Power Steering 11 Responses »
Jan 062012
Atollic TrueSTUDIO Lite

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 »

Posted by James at 12:57 pm

STM32F4 + FreeRTOS + TRUEStudio = Awesome-O

Copper, EPS - Electric Power Steering 8 Responses »
Jan 052012
STM32F4 Discovery

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)

Continue reading »

Posted by James at 9:42 pm Tagged with: , ,

EPS – Magnet Encoder Reverse Engineering

EPS - Electric Power Steering No Responses »
Dec 162011
EPS Encoder Probing

EPS Magnetic Encoder Probing

Very Cool!  The encoder works as expected.

After tracing the encoder signals back to the ASIC, I was able to use the LSA to easily probe the signals coming from the encoder board.  Well, I shouldn’t say easily because is was tough to get the grabbers on the ASIC pins without shorting them together.  In fact, on my first attempt I did have a pair of pins shorted together.  However, once the short condition was removed, the ECU didn’t seem to suffer.

The encoder signals make sense for a three phase BLDC motor application.  Have a look at the following LSA plot to see the five digital signals coming from the encoder board.  Note, the encoder board is bolted on the back of the motor.  See my previous post for pictures of the encoder board. Continue reading »

Posted by James at 4:32 pm Tagged with: , , ,

EPS Teardown

EPS - Electric Power Steering No Responses »
Dec 152011
EPS (Electric Power Steering) Module

EPS (Electric Power Steering) Module

EPS (Electric Power Steering)

Hardware Teardown & Hacking

Starting a new series today where you can follow along as I teardown (maybe repurpose) an old EPS module.  I’ve been keeping a couple of these old module in my stash for a long time, always with the idea of ripping them apart for all the goodies within.

Note, clicking on any image below will pop-up a larger high resolution version.

First step is to pull the module apart by removing the motor. Continue reading »

Posted by James at 10:23 pm Tagged with: , , ,
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