http://www.kelvinsthunderstorm.com Embedded geekery and similar pursuits Sat, 20 Feb 2010 02:31:29 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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/ 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. ... http://www.kelvinsthunderstorm.com/ecos-synthetic-target-with-ethernet/ 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 ... http://www.kelvinsthunderstorm.com/2009/02/twitter-home-automation/ 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. The Arduino is a simple embedded board with ... http://www.kelvinsthunderstorm.com/2009/02/twitter-burglar-alarm/