Wot?

This is some, hopefully useful, information about my experiments with what has become known as the Internet-of-Things. I have a large desk of bits and pieces that I will document about how they will come together to allow me to monitor my house and environment, control the stuff we use and if it helps save money, power, environment, sanity...

Saturday, November 22, 2014

BlackFin starts to take shape...

Well we move from paper to reality! It is starting to take shape... the power supplies are all working apart from one footprint being completely wrong... luckily a three pin device so not too much board chopping. The Debugger sees the DSP so we have got that right this time. Now to tweak some old BlackFin code to being happy with the BF540x... Looks a bit like Analog Devices have done a better job than some about maintaining consistency between all their families...

Sunday, November 2, 2014

It's Italy Jim but not as we know it...

Got a cheap Arduino DUE clone from Deal Extreme. Had a bit of a laugh at the standard Arduino map of Italy making it through the copying process in a rather chewed up manner. Yet to do to much to this board but it seems a reasonable quality and the USB has enumerated it as a serial port. The ARM programming port is the fiddly little 1mm pitch thing unfortunately but I'm sure we can sort that all out. The SAM Xplained code that I wrote earlier in the year should plonk down on there fairly easily...

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

BlackFin DSP in an Arduino Footprint

Well getting ready to get this board manufactured to try out! Spend this morning checking the footprints against the actual devices....
This is the BlackFin, FTDI UART interface, power regulator, logic translator and Audio DAC sitting on a printout that is 1:1- looks like it should fly so off to Hackvarna and Mitch to make into something more solderable...

Sunday, March 23, 2014

Boards Used

A quick overview of the Boards I have used:
All ARM based, All these ones are ARM Cotex M0/M0+ but there are some M3's and M4's doing some stuff. There are from Freescale, NXP, STMicroelectronics & (maybe a bit left field) Nuvoton. There are some TI and Cypress ones as well. The Code is all pretty much pure C++ with a tiny bit of assembler on occasions. There is NO CMSIS, NO LWIP, and the code is built either on IAR, Keil or GCC. I plan to release the code on GitHub or similar but it is still a bit rubbery...

The Shields that are supported are a bit of a mixed bunch, Ethernet (Wiz & ENC), NFC, XBee, Touch Pad and quite a lot of bespoke designs.

Getting Started...

OK -- so I am going to start with a few bits and pieces that I have been building for a little while. It is basically a small household monitoring and control system that currently uses some roll-your-own libraries and hardware over a simple network. Most of the boards are ARM based Arduino footprint boards running on the bare-metal with a very simple Network. I plan to experiment with perhaps changing to a CoAP and/or MQTT-SN based network or maybe something else? Lots of Ideas and not a lot of time but lets see where we go!