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…
JTAG is a common standard for communicating with modern electronic devices like FPGAs and microcontrollers. A JTAG connection will allow you to do in-circuit debugging in a bewildering variety of ways and will generally allow you to program your device. The standard, apparently, defines five connections for this purpose. Add in power and ground and you have a minimum of 7 connections needed to implement JTAG. The trick is getting them delivered to your board or device…
The Official results for the 2009 All Japan Micromouse Contest have been posted to the New Technology Foundation web site:http://www.robomedia.org/micromouse2009/2009result.html
Crossworks or, more accurately, CrossStudio for the Arm, running on a mac is probably one of the better development environments. It has its quirky side but, so far, I am really happy with it. Now might be a good time to look at how projects are organised, how the code gets onto the target and how it is started up…
Last time, the STM32 was set up to use the Internal RC oscillator, HSI. This runs at 8MHz. The PLL multiplier was told to use the HSI/2 as its input and the multiplier value was set to x 5. The result being a 20MHz system clock. Now, what happens if the PLL multiplier is increased to make the system run faster…
In the previous post, the STM32 development board was turning a LED on and off in response to a button press. Not very exciting but satisfying anyway. Next, I want to have a look at setting up the system oscillator and the systick timer…
With the Rowley Crossworks software set up, it is time to make some code. As usual, it is easiest to start out with a simple LED flasher. Why break with tradition. The target board for this project is the IAR STM32-SK because I happen to have one after winning it in a contest…
After much messing about, I finally decided how to do my STM32 ARM development. While there is a certain amount of appeal in the DIY approach, in the end I just want to write code for my processor and not battle to make sure the tools are properly configured. To this end, I have now paid for a personal licence for Rowley Crossworks for the ARM. This cross-platform toolset and IDE will run pretty much identically on Windows, Linux, Solaris and the mac. The compiler is one of the GCC releases and you get almost everything you need in one hit…
On Saturday November 28th 2009, we held out our semi-formal winter event for the micromouse and small robot builder. Held at Millennium Point in Birmingham and made possible by Birmingham City University, this is an ideal opportunity to get in a bit of mid-year competition and size up the opposition before those long winter nights of robot building and tweaking…
Finals day! I really expected to be nothing more than a spectator today so I was pretty excited about the fact that I would be able to run in the finals. No matter what happened, I felt that was a bit of an achievement. Apart from any nervousness, this was a fairly relaxed day. We could concentrate on watching the other contests as they were being run one after another. First up was the robotrace line follower contest…