Embedded – 25120

A Better STM32F0 Prototyping Experience

Mon, 03 Feb 2020 21:04:32 +0100

This project started when I was particularly annoyed by existing development board options and cheap Chinese PCB prototyping services were starting to emerge. Thus, the path forward was clear, but let’s start with the problems I was trying to solve.

When I’m talking about ‘development boards’, I mean boards like the Teensy models, Feather variants or blue pill: a PCB based laid out around a microcontroller containing very little extra circuitry; a ‘least common denominator’ of typical projects using that MCU, if you will. Evaluation boards with more interesting circuitry are great to get used to a microcontroller and its peripherals but lie beyond the scope of this post.

Building a Camera with a Rather Undersized Microcontroller

Fri, 24 Aug 2018 13:25:00 +0200

Disclaimer: This project was hacked together more or less in a weekend. Not much documentation is available besides the source code. If you want to build this (in the off-chance that you got your hands on one of these printer modules), you’d have to extract the schematic information from pinning.h and supply your own stepper motor driver and level shifter circuit.

I had these thermal printer modules, 4 of them, after I bought them because they were cheap and seemed interesting. For years they physically were somewhere in a drawer; in my mind though, they were taunting me. Something had to be done!

Thermocouple via Integrated Differential Amplifier

Sat, 26 Jul 2014 18:38:13 +0100

Recently, I needed a simple temperature switch which could withstand 400 °C. A thermocouple can easily manage this but its generated voltage is unpleasantly small. However, it turns out that a ATTiny216A’s integrated differential amplifier is absolutely sufficient for a, albeit not very accurate, measurement. Enough to determine if something is hot or not, at least.