I recently studied a robotic lawn mover and realized that I can easily build one of those myself. To get started I need two wheels with separate motors and the picture above is the driving mechanism for an electric scateboard. The wheels are 200mm in diameter and entire construction is ca 400mm wide. It is…
Arduino recently launched a new version of NANO with a powerfully 32-bit ARM M4 core, 64Mhz speed, 1Mb Flash and 256 Mb SRAM. And this is just the beginning. It’s MCU is nRF52840 that also contains a BLE Radio and SW stack. It has all the features you expect from a modern M4, but it…
STM32L011F4 only have 16Kb Flash, and as I generate the code I need from STM32CubeIDE it compiles to 11,37Kb on Debug, leaving only 4,63Kb Free for the application. Looking at the map I see several nasty C functions n the drivers. The GCC compiler is decently good and greedy on bytes, but that don’t help…
This is the block diagram for XPortHub2 with an added Watchdog/D-bus. My objective here is that I want to add some features to the board and decided to do an experiment adding an external Watchdog/D-Bus by using a smaller STM32 in support. SPX3819 can be switched on/off enabling me to power a board on/off. Adding…
Fiber modules have been around for some years. The picture below show a 14.- USD 8 x Ethernet/2 x Fiber Mux/Switch that can be found on AliExpress etc. I have also seen smaller modules and 16 x Ethernet modules in the same price range – also boxed versions. The interesting thing about these is that…
The industry around me is a heavy user of CANopen (SIIS2) which is the “Subsea” version of a CAN protocol. CANopen is similar to Modbus, but it offer more functionality. It is also a more complicated protocol stack that tend to cost from 5-15K USD depending on content. I have written CANopen protocols in the…
Many modern applications use custom theme/styles, but this is actually far more difficult to implement than you would expect on Windows. Windows have a lot of standard GUI components where you can control most, but not all colors and styles. So, if you want dark theme you either need to buy a library or start…
UML is a well accepted standard for modeling complex software solutions, but it has never reached executable accuracy. The standard lack a technique that allow executable logic, which is exactly what PLD does. This is key to having a tool with 1:1 between diagrams and code. I started modeling with Entity-Relationship Diagrams years ago, and…
Some of you will remember that I planned a “System Diagram” in Plain! That was a block of configuration code that tied event on modules together. This is exactly what I plan to use UML State Diagrams for. In this diagram we generate a Temp Changed event on one device that is sent to a…
This costed me ca 400.- USD on a local shop, so I decided to try it out. The first thing is the visual look. FlashForge Finder 2 looks like a furniture and can easily be placed in a living room or office. One negative issue is the manual – it’s a bit short and it…