Author Archives: Peter Harrison

Minos 2012 Schedule

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Peter Harrison

Minos 2012 is just two weeks away. There is still time to arrange to attend. So that you can see what you are missing, here is a first draft of the schedule:

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Determine STM32 reset source

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Peter Harrison

When your STM32 processor starts up from a reset, there are a number of possible sources for that reset. You may want to perform different initialisations depending on the exact source of the reset.

Posted in Hardware, STM32 | 4 Comments

Decimus 4 progress – minus a little smoke

Posted on March 24, 2012 by Peter Harrison

It didn’t take long to get the first Decimus 4 board on the bench for a build. This first one will serve as a static testbed for code development and sensor testing. After verifying that the power supplies were good, … Continue reading →

Posted in Hardware, Micromouse | 4 Comments

Searching for the perfect screw

Posted on March 24, 2012 by Peter Harrison

Here in the UK, we use metric fasteners. When you go shopping for small screws though, the only sizes you can generally get below M3 are old, awkward imperial sizes. Even if you are happy with M3, the variety of … Continue reading →

Posted in Hardware | 3 Comments

Decimus 4 Begins

Posted on March 22, 2012 by Peter Harrison

It has been more than two years since I promised myself that I would move on and build a new micromouse using the STM32 processor. Finally, I have done something about it. The new mouse is Decimus 4.

Posted in Micromouse, STM32 | 1 Comment

Some historic micromouse videos

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Peter Harrison

Way back in 1985 was the ‘First World Micromouse Competition’. This was not actually the first competition, nor was it really the first ‘world’ competition in the sense of having entries from around the world. Nonetheless, it was a major … Continue reading →

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Adding DMA to the SPI driver with the STM32F4

Posted on March 11, 2012 by Peter Harrison

Sending data over SPI with the STM32 using polling is simple and reliable but your processor is blocked, unable to do anything else until the transfer is complete. Direct Memory Access (DMA) allows you to initiate a transfer of a … Continue reading →

Posted in STM32 | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

STM32F4 uses SPI for the MAX6966 LED driver

Posted on March 10, 2012 by Peter Harrison

The STM32F4xx devices are not short of pins and they can be more flexibly used than on the STM32F1xx types. On a micromouse though, there is not a lot of physical space and I am not good at routing lots … Continue reading →

Posted in STM32 | 5 Comments

Using the STM32F4 internal oscillator

Posted on March 10, 2012 by Peter Harrison

In an effort to minimise the amount of space taken up on my micromouse board, I wanted to use the internal oscillator (HSI) built in to the STM32F4 device I am using. As ever, working out how to set that … Continue reading →

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APEC 2012 Mice

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Peter Harrison

The APEC 2012 contest had a good turnout of mice. There wer, I believe, 19 entries. For some reason, I failed to get good pictures of all of them but here are some images of most of them…

Posted in Apec, Micromouse | 5 Comments