January 20, 2010
Last week I released Atomthreads, a free RTOS for embedded systems. This project grew from a task scheduler I created some time ago and subsequently extended with semaphore, mutex, queue and timer modules. The result was a lightweight and portable set of kernel sources which can be dropped in to any embedded systems project to add a thread scheduler. It has been useful to me so I decided to open source it in case it proves useful to anyone else. Continue reading
November 24, 2009
I came across the STM8S Discovery board today, which is selling at the notable price of just £4.25 from Farnell (also £4.22 from Future Electronics). With this pricing, ST are clearly trying to stimulate interest in the STM8 architecture by appealing to the tinkerer market. It remains to be seen whether this can be converted into serious design wins.
November 23, 2009
If you arrived here while looking for information on Kelvin's Thunderstorm, you can read a great introduction at Electropaedia. From the article:
Kelvin's Thunderstorm is an amazing water powered electrostatic generator, which can be made from simple materials at home or school, capable of generating a potential of tens of thousands of volts at its terminals. It was invented by Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) in… Continue reading
October 4, 2009
I have recently connected up an Omnima Embedded Board to an Xbee device, using it as a low-cost and low-power controller for a home Xbee network. This article explains how to configure an Omnima with OpenWRT/Linux such that is capable of talking to an Xbee device using Python and Pyserial. Continue reading
September 30, 2009
If you're in the market for a low cost embedded Linux development board then look no further than the Omnima embedded controller. £23 gets you a MIPS platform with Ethernet and USB host ports, 16MB of RAM and (via OpenWRT) a wide-ranging repository of pre-packaged Linux applications and libraries. Compared to the likes of the Arduino, this is a lot of bang for your buck.
September 3, 2009
Recently when packaging up a Windows installer for PyKaraoke I came across a problem with Py2exe's handling of Pygame DLLs.
Py2exe is a utility to convert Python scripts into Windows executables. It should automatically seek out any DLLs required for the application to run independently, and bundle these with the application installer. For a Pygame application a variety of SDL DLLs are used and must be bundled with… Continue reading
February 27, 2009
One of the convenient features of the eCos real time operating system is the ability to develop and test code on your Linux development PC without downloading to target hardware. This can be done using hardware emulation (via QEMU or VMWare) or just using the built in "Synthetic Target" support. I have documented here the various steps required to install and configure the Synthetic Target on Linux (Ubuntu). As… Continue reading
February 21, 2009
If you caught the recent article I wrote about my Twitter Burglar Alarm you might be wondering what the point is in using a message broadcast service like Twitter for communicating with your home. Broadcast messages are pointless for most home automation purposes - and in some cases you may actually prefer the messages to be protected from viewing by the public.
What was not obvious to some of those… Continue reading
February 9, 2009
A burglar alarm that tweets when an intruder enters the house? What with the fashion for Twitter lately, I thought I'd give it a go, and this also gave me the excuse I'd been looking for to try out the Arduino hardware platform.
