I’m not generally one to repost articles and links to articles – you won’t find much of that on my blog. Nor am I particularly pro-this or anti-that when it comes to technologies, brands, companies, etc. I have Apple products and non-Apple products. I’ve used various flavours of Mac OS, of DOS, of Windows, of [...]

Some time ago I built a signal generator, which is a reasonably handy bit of equipment. But I was periodically frustrated with not having a suitable probe to easily inject a signal into a circuit. The standard BNC – BNC cable has its uses, but isn’t too great for that kind of thing. And a [...]

Recently I purchased a Class 10 SD Card from a major retailer. I was very excited – now I have a fast card for testing. Here’s my new baby:

Note the 10 in the part-circle indicating the speed. For those who don’t know, the “class” speed system for SD cards is very simple. It’s the write [...]

I’m using the STM32F2xx DCMI port to receive data from an CMOS image sensor. There aren’t too many Cortex-M3 or M4 parts which have this ability natively; the STM32F2xx is a rare breed. It’s a very nice feature. Along the way I’ve learnt a few things about the DCMI port, some of which are documented, [...]

If you’re moving a bunch of data around, the DMA controllers are going to be your best friends. However they have their quirks and undocumented features. This post will describe what I’ve learned about them, and hopefully others can contribute if they can shed light as well.
Note there is also a Part 2 to this [...]

I’ve been doing a lot of work recently with the new ST processor, the STM32F2xx family. It’s a Cortex-M3 part running at 120 MHz. It’s a nice part, however I’ve lost a lot of time discovering, well, let’s not call them “bugs”, let’s instead call them “undocumented features” of the part. At the time of [...]

If you’re designing an electronics product that will ultimately be sold, you need to comply with EMI rules. FCC, CE / CISPR, whatever it might be in your market, these regulations set limits to how much EMI your product can radiate. After all, nobody wants the TV to stop working when your product is switched [...]

Texas Instruments has a very cool little MSP430 development kit, in the form of a watch. It’s called the Chronos. At the recent MSP430 seminars they had a 50% off offer, so for $25 I purchased one with the intent of modifying its software.
The really neat thing about this watch is that it contains what [...]

This was a fun and short little project that I’ve recently updated. If you’re thinking about building a cheap signal generator that’ll work to 20 MHz or so, and would be DDS (direct digital synthesis) based, take a look at this:
http://www.frankvh.com/dds-signal-generator.html
It works pretty well.

I had a need for a cheap, quick & not-so-dirty signal generator [...]

It seems that every little widget (processor or whatever) I work with has a serial port on it, which is extremely handy for printing status and debugging information, etc. These serial ports are of course “TTL” level, which means they’re at the level of whatever the part’s I/O voltage is, usually 3.3V but not always. [...]