APEC is coming

The annual APEC micromouse will soon be upon us. This year the contest will be held in Palm Springs, California at the Palm Springs Convention Center on Monday, February 22nd. APEC is the Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition. It is held annually in the US in a different venue each year. I believe it tends to be in the warmer parts of the USA to provide a bit of winter relief...

Micromouse Book

A long time ago I decided to collect together the various things I found out while getting started in the madness that is micromouse. The idea was that, it is pretty hard to find these things out for yourself, working alone, even with the power of the mighty Google to hand. So, to save some trouble and give newcomers a head start, I put it all together into some web pages. These were originally published on another site which will probably be gone by the time you get to read this.

Imperial College Robot Team aims for Eurobot

Imperial College are intending to field a team in the Eurobot competition in May 2010. On their public blog they are busy providing interesting updates on their progress. For those not familiar with Eurobot, this is a large, international amateur robotics contest that has been running since 1998.

Find out more about Eurobot here:
http://www.eurobot.org/eng/index.php

Major Site Changes

The site is undergoing a major change. I have dumped the old content management software used in the root and imported all the blog posts here from the Wordpress site they were living in. Once the indexes have re-built, that will mean that the old CMS pages and the blog posts can be searched together. The new software makes many aspects of the site easier to manage and will let me import the content currently found on my original micromouse site at Cannock.

STM32 USART basics

A USART is a universal synchronous asynchronous receiver transmitter. A serial port if you like. On the STM32 however, it really is universal. This peripheral has a raft of features for a huge range of serial protocols including all the usual asynchronous modes plus IrDA, LIN, Smartcard Emulation and the ability to function as an SPI port…