Yet another rambling blog
I was blindsided when the support contract scheme is suddenly applied to GPGMail. I have spent some time reading into the code regarding the support contract, and figured out the way to patch it out.
I have decided against releasing the patch directly in order to put up some barrier of entry to this – as you have to either patch it yourself with your own labor and bear with the constant nag, or pay GPGTools team to remove the limitations.
In this series, we set up an ARM Cortex-M development environment and write some code targeting STM32F407, but using only open-source tools. The general process should be similar for all ARM Cortex-M processors.
This is the first part of the series, detailing the process of installing the IDE and the tools and setting up the development environment.
Continue reading “ARM development with Eclipse CDT – Part 1”
STC microcontrollers sometimes comes with built-in ADC. It can be a little bit tricky to use as the relevant pins have to be switched between analog and digital mode.
Continue reading “Exploring STC MCU part 6 – Feeling the environment”
It is finally the time to get the chip to speak up – start communicating over the serial link. Keeping true to the nature of my previous example code, the serial driver code will adapt to the oscillator frequency and baudrate you wish to use.
Remember back in part 3 I wrote the timing code? That code only works with a 24MHz clock. And I didn’t have the watchdog running yet. So I am gonna fix it.
The bug I encountered on STC15W4K61S4 is resolved: this chip, being much more complicated than the traditional 8051 my textbooks was written for, have a bit of quirks that can break code compatibility between them.
Continue reading “Exploring STC MCU part 3.5 – bug explained”
I am digging deeper into the STC 8051 ecosystem by attempting to write my first bits of actual code on this platform. This experiment took me a few days to execute as I need to wrestle a few bugs along the way, and ended up getting me ordering a few samples from STC directly.
Continue reading “Exploring STC MCU Part 3 – Samples, bugs, and the first lines of code”
STC proudly claims that their MCU are fast. And from what I see in their core clock timing table they have a new core design that accelerated the instructions a lot. So how fast is it? Continue reading “Exploring STC MCU Part 2 – So how fast is it?”
It seem to me that there are some interest in ultra cheap microcontrollers. The Chinese brand STC makes a few 8051-compatible MCU which sells at ridiculously cheap prices.
I have an old Dell Latitude D620 with Intel Core Duo T2300E processor, 4GB of RAM (aftermarket upgrade kit,) and nVidia Quadro NVS 110M graphics. The machine was sitting in storage for quite a while, but I suddenly I find myself in the need of a Windows-running PC with a real serial port for some maintenance work on my KVM adapter and my managed switch. So I decided to take it out of mothballs and give it somewhat a new life.
Continue reading “Upgrading my old Dell, and fixing the ID chip”