Category: Embedded Development

Water Detector

This drawing illustrate a water detector. A water detector is basically a standard ADC reading between two resistors where the 2nd resistor is a PCB as illustrated above. As the water raises the PCB will start leading current and the ADC reading will move from 3.3V to GND. This is the same principle as used…

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PLC Sensors and Actuators

One major issue is how to identify units in a network. I used STM32F030F4 on these and I absolutely love this little MCU costing 50 cent in TSSOP20 package, but it lack the serial number that is burned into other STM32 MCU’s. This serial number is crucial as it present a factory set ID allowing…

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PLC Cottage Surveillance

My grandparents passed away some years ago leaving a beautifully mountain farm behind. As no-one lives up there we have to leave the farm unattended for months at the time. This is a challenge in winter time as we fear the water pipes with freeze. The farm actually got internet installed so it is possible…

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On-Line Documentation

I just uploaded a design doc for the Universal Motor Controller on the downloads page. I used LibreOffice 5.3 since it could export to PDF, but believe me this is the last time I use that. I had so many problems importing drawings that I ended up importing everything to Word and then copy &…

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Universal Motor Controller

I designed this universal motor controller capable on driving DC-, Stepper-, BLDC- and even AC – motors earlier. The design parameters was 12-24V at 15A. This is quite a capable controller, but I did a mistake that limit the controller to 12-20V since I connected the Gate Drivers to the Motor PSU directly. To compensate…

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Fast ADC

The build in 12 bit ADC will give a resolution of 0.007V if I use it to control a 30V Lab PSU, so I was looking for something with a higher resolution. I did find something that could handle 24 bit @ 2.4Msps, but it required a NDA to see the price – I think…

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STM32F042F6 breakout

A breakout board with STM32F042F6. This can also handle STM32F030F4. Very small, cute and breadboard friendly. This little MCU is Corex M0 32 bit, 48Mhz, 32Kb Flash, 6Kb SRAM and contain a long list of IO including touch contacts. The board include x-tal (not mounted here) and a 3.3V PSU that also can act as…

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HAL – Software Wiring

Hardware Abstraction Layer is a thin layer of software that “abstract” your code away from the actual electronics. Actually one of the better implementations around is the Arduino library, so it is many good reasons to copy this as much as possible. But, not all of it as Arduino was implemented on a 8 bit…

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