Discovery: Button Interrupts

This week, Andrei discusses how our button can be used to generate an interrupt. Other examples include engine management computers. What things should you look out for when using interrupts. 

Don't miss the photo at the bottom of the post for a useful hack.

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Discovery: Follow The Bouncing Bit

This time, Andrei looks into switches, their bouncy nature, Schmitt triggers, hardware, and software debounce techniques. Join us for a look into the resistors and capacitors leading to port PA0. See oscilloscope traces in black AND white! All of this and more in this embedded.fm blog post!

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Discovery: Buttons

This week Andrei is writing about buttons. First a bunch of the background stuff that goes along with buttons, how the positrons scoot around and finally make it to the processor. Then he takes a look at the HAL code used to read the button position.

How hard can it be? Well sit down and get comfortable, this won't hurt a bit (we'll leave the hurting bit for next time, Bwa ha haaaaa).

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Discovery: Documentation

Do you suffer from the devastating effects of DSA? There is hope, my friends: you can overcome your Data Sheet Anxiety with these great tips. 

This week, Andrei introduces the documentation set for the STM32F4 DISC1 board, and discusses how to overcome the horrors of DSA.

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Protection

Last week was complete crap. The storms of July showed up and I ended up with water in my basement twice in one week. My article took a back seat to the mundane tasks of home ownership. Grumble.

This week's post is a contentious little piece on protecting your boards from getting copied. It goes into some of the legal aspects, clever hardware ideas that don't work, and finally how to protect your code.

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On Mechanical Sympathy

Jackie Stewart was the Formula 1 World Driving Champion in 1969, 1971, and 1973. He raced in the Can-Am series (even here in Edmonton) butting heads with the likes of Bruce McLaren himself. 

One thing that Jackie had going for him was that he was smooth. He became a part of the car, they worked together. He worked hard to understand what the car was telling him, and how to get the car adjusted to work with him. He had Mechanical Sympathy.

In computing, we are given operating systems, compilers, databases, and machines. By getting our own version of mechanical sympathy, we can understand what is happening, and use our knowledge to get the maximum out of our systems.

In this post, Andrei goes a little deeper into mechanical sympathy and gives some links to videos and podcasts for your enjoyment.

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Embedded Systems - from the Guy Who Started It All

Desktop computers constitute approximately 0% of all microprocessor sales by volume. Who knew? Not very many people as it turns out.

In this short video, the inventor of the microprocessor, Ted Hoff, discusses how the average person doesn't understand the role of embedded control.

 

(Intel 4004 image by Thomas Nguyen CC BY-SA 4.0)

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An Idea for a Weasley Clock

In Harry Potter, there was a magical item called a Weasley Clock which showed where everyone in the family was at  particular time. Tom from Australia wrote in, wanting to design one but not sure how to get started. He’s new to embedded but is a software developer. I was amused by the idea of such a clock and procrastinating about another project so I put together a response. Happily, Tom says you can read his mail so here it is.

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Elementary Quantum Mechanics

Some of you may have suffered through enough physics in college to remember something called the “Electron in a box” model. Well, today I’m going to show you an Electron coming out of a box.

A while back I wrote up a small project with the Particle.io Photon, a Wifi-enabled prototyping board that can be programmed using Arduino-like code. I got a surprise in the mail this week:  an intriguing successor to the Photon, the also unsearchably named “Electron”. 

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