http://www.kelvinsthunderstorm.com Embedded geekery and similar pursuits Tue, 13 Jul 2010 21:38:42 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Recently I've been considering how useful it would be if the embedded systems world had something similar to Perl's CPAN: an open repository of software modules useful for embedded systems and portable across any RTOS. This was partly triggered by a thread on StackOverflow from someone who wanted to know why ... http://www.kelvinsthunderstorm.com/universal-device-driver-framework-for-embedded-systems/ Atomthreads now contains support for Raisonance's STM8 compiler RCSTM8. We now support all three available STM8 compilers (Cosmic, IAR and Raisonance) so you can choose to use Atomthreads for a project safe in the knowledge that switching compilers will be pain-free. The STM8 port contains largely common code with only a small ... http://www.kelvinsthunderstorm.com/rtos-for-raisonance-rcstm8/ This week Atomthreads became the first RTOS to support Embedded Workbench (EWSTM8), the STM8 compiler launched by IAR last month. EWSTM8 provides a full professional-grade development and debug environment with support for hardware debuggers including the low cost STM8S Discovery platform. IAR offer a 30-day evaluation of the full version, as ... http://www.kelvinsthunderstorm.com/stm8-rtos-for-iar-embedded-workbench/ I have just completed a port of the Atomthreads RTOS to the STM8 microcontroller. Anyone interested in running an RTOS on the STM8 can download the source code from http://atomthreads.com. This has to be one of the easiest architectures I've ever ported an RTOS to. There are only six CPU registers ... http://www.kelvinsthunderstorm.com/atomthreads-free-rtos-for-stm8/ 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 ... http://www.kelvinsthunderstorm.com/atomthreads-open-source-rtos/ 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 will be interesting to ... http://www.kelvinsthunderstorm.com/stm8s-discovery-evaluation-board/ 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 ... http://www.kelvinsthunderstorm.com/what-is-kelvins-thunderstorm/ 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. The ... http://www.kelvinsthunderstorm.com/omnimaopenwrt-and-xbee/ 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 ... http://www.kelvinsthunderstorm.com/omnima-embedded-controller-and-openwrt/ 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 ... http://www.kelvinsthunderstorm.com/py2exe-and-pygame-dlls/