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…
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…
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…
Many modern applications use custom theme/styles, but this is actually far more difficult to implement than you would expect on Windows. Windows have a lot of standard GUI components where you can control most, but not all colors and styles. So, if you want dark theme you either need to buy a library or start…
UML is a well accepted standard for modeling complex software solutions, but it has never reached executable accuracy. The standard lack a technique that allow executable logic, which is exactly what PLD does. This is key to having a tool with 1:1 between diagrams and code. I started modeling with Entity-Relationship Diagrams years ago, and…
This costed me ca 400.- USD on a local shop, so I decided to try it out. The first thing is the visual look. FlashForge Finder 2 looks like a furniture and can easily be placed in a living room or office. One negative issue is the manual – it’s a bit short and it…
UML State Diagram is a standard, but I find it’s implementation into tools to be wage. So, I implement my own adaption because I intend to have a 1:1 with actual source code. This is not uncommon as most automation tools will have to make adaption in areas where executable accuracy is weak. I was…