MAC

STM32 on the Mac – The ST Peripheral Driver Library

Posted Mon, 18/05/2009 - 10:29 by peteh

It would be nice to start with a simple LED flashing, blinky type application. Well simple is a bit of an overstatement. The code to blink an LED is easy enough but those nice folk at ST have provided a special peripheral driver library. This library abstracts much of the hardware from the user and should make for more portable code. The library sources are all in standard C and are supposed to compile up just like anything.  Even with the benefit if an IDE, this would be a bit tricky to set up. Without one, it means a lot of messing about with makefiles, linker scripts and startup code. This is how I set up mine on a Mac. Much the same arrangement will work just fine on a PC. Included is a project template to speed things up…

STM32 Arm-Cortex bootloader

Posted Fri, 08/05/2009 - 02:22 by peteh
One of the more attractive features or the STM32 processors, at least in their more recent revisions, is the presence of a built-in serial bootloader. JTAG is all very well but you need extra hardware and then software to drive it. If you want to do in-circuit debugging, it is ideal. However, for my use, I don’t much want a 20 pin header and I find the debugging feature for a micromouse to be a little redundant. Debugging can be done on a static test rig. But then, if I want to update the mouse software, a serial bootloader is perfect and I can use the same serial connection to communicate with my code when it is running

ARM Cortex-M3 (STM32) development on the Mac

Posted Wed, 06/05/2009 - 03:23 by peteh

stm32-chip

The whole ARM processor core thing is really attractive. Here is a widespread, powerful core available in a whole bunch of packages and processor combinations from a range of suppliers. Then there came the Cortex-M3 version. More interesting still is the ST processor series known as the STM32. These really are interesting. they are cheap, readily available, fast, have a peripheral set that could be made for the kind of tasks I am most interested in and you can get free or low cost development tools…

USBasp on the Mac

Posted Sat, 07/03/2009 - 21:08 by peteh
IMG_3576The USBasp AVR programmer arrived today so I lost no time connecting it up to give it a try. This is a clever little beast that uses a software USB stack on a pre-programmed ATMEGA8 processor. It works directly with AVRdude to program your target processor with the minimum of fuss.

AVR, Eclipse and the Mac

Posted Mon, 02/03/2009 - 02:45 by peteh

eclipse_home_header.jpgAVRMacPack works well enough in Xcode but I don't understand Xcode so I wen looking for an alternative. While trawling through back issues of SERVO magazine, I came across a pair of articles by Dennis Clarke about setting up Eclipse with AVRMacPack and the avr-eclipse plugin. One of my recurring mistakes is the feeling that you can't have enough development tools so I gave it a go...