I recently studied a robotic lawn mover and realized that I can easily build one of those myself. To get started I need two wheels with separate motors and the picture above is the driving mechanism for an electric scateboard. The wheels are 200mm in diameter and entire construction is ca 400mm wide. It is…
Some good news in the middst of this pandemic. Italian doctors state they now see a weakened corona virus compared to what hit Italy in the first wave. Lets cross fingers and hope this proves to be correct. Best look to all of you!
Arduino recently launched a new version of NANO with a powerfully 32-bit ARM M4 core, 64Mhz speed, 1Mb Flash and 256 Mb SRAM. And this is just the beginning. It’s MCU is nRF52840 that also contains a BLE Radio and SW stack. It has all the features you expect from a modern M4, but it…
This illustration show the 6 signals currenty used for “Device Bus”. The 3 first are a standard SPI in Half Duplex mode. That means that one device is Half Duplex Master driving the clock and sending on MOSI, while the others send/receive on MISO. The extra signals are designed to assist in deciding whom becomes…
I decided to change XPortHub2 due to parts of the layout – I need to use SPI 1 for “Device Bus” due to speed on F405, but the paths was crossed with Ethernet SPI and USB, meaning I had high frequency signals close without any isolation. I decided to re-route that part and add the…
I needed a board to test the new Device Bus/Watchdog so I stripped a XPortHub2 and added the logic that can be seen in the top right corner. It occupies almost 1/4 of the board so it does require some space. I need to work on that to find an optimal layout/solution. I am considering…
This is the schematics for Device-Bus, current sensor and power switch. I have a stripped down XPortHub that I might use for testing – removing W5500 leaves plenty of space without digging into 2nd side and 4 layer design. I simply would like to make some boards, put them in a stack and test for…
I was in the middle of planning a 8 pin bit-bang bus as my attention was drawn to STM32G070KB that cost 0.7 USD, comes in a LQFP32 package and contains: 2 x 1Mbps I2C, 2 x 32Mbps SPI, 4 x 6Mbps USARTS, 128Kb Flash, 32KbSRAM, running at 64Mhz and 7 DMA channels. Looking at the…
STM32L011F4 only have 16Kb Flash, and as I generate the code I need from STM32CubeIDE it compiles to 11,37Kb on Debug, leaving only 4,63Kb Free for the application. Looking at the map I see several nasty C functions n the drivers. The GCC compiler is decently good and greedy on bytes, but that don’t help…
This is the block diagram for XPortHub2 with an added Watchdog/D-bus. My objective here is that I want to add some features to the board and decided to do an experiment adding an external Watchdog/D-Bus by using a smaller STM32 in support. SPX3819 can be switched on/off enabling me to power a board on/off. Adding…