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The PCB for this project was sponsored by PCBWay . While I was planning the project anyway, the choice to use their service was based primarily on the offer of a free board. I'm working on a Hacky Racer , that is an electric go-kart type vehicle for a UK based racing competition. The budget is strictly limited to keep the competition field level, but one of the permitted extras is lights (they…
I recently bought a NiimBot B1 printer on Aliexpress based on the assumption that it must be easy to use. There were mentions of an Android app (I have an Android device so that's a good backup) and some promising looking things on GitHub. I'd sort of assumed that these things were cheap and popular because they were really easy to build into your workflow for whatever labeling project you had in…
At OggCamp this year I was on the scheduled track and presented a brief history of my RepRap 3D printer on the main stage. The printer is over a decade old but spent a few years in a box. Actually I've been working on it for about 8 years now but I hope it will be done in the next 2 years... I should document all this in detail but I don't really have time. For now you can take a look at the…
Overview This blog post is meant to cover a bunch of different things about developing large, complex and sophisticated but highly reliable applications on STM32 microcontrollers. Lots of the stuff I'm writing about will have applications on other embedded systems which use FreeRTOS but I'm sticking to the ecosystem I know best. I've done this stuff several times over for various employers over…
It's been a while since I got anything done on the Noodle Game console, but I found it on my desk and had a few minutes to spare so thought I'd have a crack at upgrading the screen driver code. It was a little bit of a disappointing exercise but at least I've learned some things. Stuck in 24 bit The screen supposedly supports a bunch of different colour depths including 18 bit (6 bits of each…
Just less than a year ago I decided it would be interesting to try out a Microsoft Surface as an alternative to an Android tablet and maybe more portable than my venerable ThinkPad T430. I got a cheap unit from eBay to try it out, it's a Surface Pro 5 so pretty old now. Of course I didn't want to use Windows on it and I was thrilled with how easy getting a nice Linux install was on this very…
In my current series on building my own handheld games console I've been developing for the STM32 inside VSCode. It's a reasonably comfortable IDE that works well on Linux and there's the STM32-for-VSCode extension. That extension aims to automate everything for you but as usual with embedded development not everything is quite that joined up...
Now that the screen lights up and displays something, next on my list was a way to make the screen show useful things dynamically with as little code as possible. I decided to go with LVGL which is a framework for creating embedded GUIs on small graphical displays. It's implemented in C and is impressively flexible whilst leaving the programming interface familiar to anyone who's used Qt, GTK etc.
Now that the toolchain and the basics are working, the next thing to do is to start getting some of the peripherals working. I like to do this one at a time and it's usually best to start with the outputs first, that way you can use the outputs to test whether the inputs are working. We've proven the basic UART comms already, so the next big output device is the screen. The screen I've got came…
I've got a collection of parts on hand left over from various projects or bought for projects that never started, so I'm going to try and build a system as a prototype. The core of the system is the STM32F429 which I have on a "Discovery board". The one I'm using is the original production run STM32F429I-DISCO board which has long since been replaced by the STM32F429I-DISC1 board. As far as I can…