Some time ago, I wrote a post explaining why a minimal knowledge of bare-metal programming is a must for a modern MCU programmer.
Here is a follow up, showing a minimal example with a cheap, though quite popular hardware setup. The application will show you how to:
prepare the Makefile and linker script with no external dependencies;
write the minimal code to boot the board, set the clock and initialize the UART;
have a loop writing data to UART, once every second.
If you want your child to become a "computer genius", don't buy him a smart phone.
I was struggling with a Microchip LAN 9500 with no EEPROM saving its MAC address. While using the smsc95xx driver provided by the Linux kernel, I found out the kernel was (reasonably) creating a random address at each reboot.
My client didn't like this, and he only needed the hw to be installed in a LAN, so I began to look for a way of spoofing the MAC address.
When I approached embedded Linux about 15 years ago, soon after I thought that compiling a whole system from scratch is one of the most fascinating activities for a low-level programmer. It gives you the feeling "you know all parts of the system, and can put your hands on it".
In this post I will describe how I adapted the FatFs library to the SDIO (SD Card) port of a STM32F4xx family microcontroller. The code is bare-metal programming, directly writing to the registers, with no usage of external libraries.
In this post I will describe a small project I published some time ago, while working on a NXP microcontroller. It helps in setting the correct register values for proper UART initialization in LPC family MCUs.
When working with microcontrollers, floating point number computation are often not available in hardware. Modern toolchains normally provide a math library having a software simulation for floating point and math functions: this is time consuming and may even be useless, because microcontrollers do normally work with integer numbers (e.g. the input of an ADC).
Welcome on my blog. My name is Aurelio Colosimo.
In my blog I will soon add some code snippets, algorithms or small electronic circuits, hopefully useful for the community.
If you want to know more about me, this is my website: https://www.aureliocolosimo.it.