Category Archives: Microcontrollers

Automatic router reboot device with Arduino

For quite some time I was experiencing a problem with my router. When the temperature rises behind the window it just starts to freak out. Every once two weeks or so it drops the Internet connection. Local network is still running but the incoming or outcoming connections are terminated. The only solution to this problem is to reset the router or just take out the plug and insert it after a few seconds. However, it requires me to do this every few days to make sure that the connection is good and running. I have decided to automatize the process with Arduino since it was laying around.

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Spot welder with Arduino

Some time ago I have decided to make myself a electric bike — e-bike as they are called now. However, buying a stock solution, I mean a stock e-bike, was not an option because mainly of two reasons. The stock e-bikes are quite expensive stuff, this is one. The second one is about the actual parameters of the electrical bicycle. Manufactures sell e-bikes which have limited power output to 250 Watts and are only meant to support you and not drive themselves. But wait a minute … This should be about a spot welder not the e-bike ;). Well, each electric devices ought to have a power source and this is how the idea about making my own spot welder was born.

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ST-Link-V1 — Obsoleted but not depreciated

Yes, I am still using the practically obsoleted ST-Link-V1 on a STM32F1 disco board. It still gets the job done but regretfully it is not supported out of the box by IDE I happen to use from time to time.

When I gave a try to the AC6 (SW4STM32) I found out that, to not much of a surprise, the ST-Link-V1 is not supported. Only V2 and V2.1 are supported. Well, I decided to change that unfortunate situation because I have two of the disco boards with this debugger laying around.

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SPL vs HAL: which one should you use (and Low Layer Library) — part 2

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Some time ago I have written SPL vs HAL: which one should you use where I have focused on differences between two main frameworks for STM32 — Standard Peripheral Library (SPL) and Hardware Abstraction Layer commonly known as HAL. Since the recent post only focuses on those two sets of libraries I have decided to write some examples which can tip the scale. What is more, at the end of previous article I have asked an important question for a developer — does the STM is going to introduce us to a brand new library. Answer to this and other questions are further in this post.

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Mechanical filter for UAV — damping IMU vibrations

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Good quality estimation of tilt angles such as roll and pitch is desired when it comes to an UAV control. Without good quality signal a proper work of flight controller is nearly impossible. However, the task of filtering is not an easy task, especially when it comes to DSP (digital signal processing). It is even harder when digital filter is inadequate. In this post a mechanical filter is presented that allows to significantly improve attitude estimation in terms of roll, pitch and yaw.

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STM32 HAL driver for I2C OLED display with U8glib

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Recently, I have come to a conclusion that it would be good to print the state of my quadrocopter on a display. The question was what kind of display should I use. I decided to give a try to a small 0.96″ OLED display with I2C interface. It is based on SSD1603 driver. You can see this display on the image above. However, there was an issue regarding the screen controller. But it was soon solved. I have come across the U8glib which is a graphic library, quite popular among Arduino users. As soon as I started to read about the library I realized that it does not support STM32, not mentioning the HAL library.

Well, I have solved that 😉

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Using FatFS with HAL

Recently I have written a short post about the HAL library created by STM32. The HAL is gaining popularity among hobbyists and is more and more frequently used. However, when you would like to use it for something else than just basic stuff like generating PWM on digital output you have to write it by yourself. Not so long ago I had to use SD card in one of my projects. It turned out that there is no driver for FatFS based on HAL – at least there was not. I decided to write the driver and here you can read about it…

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SPL vs HAL: which one should you use

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There is an unending dispute about which library should you use when writing an application for STM32 microcontroller. Actually, there are at least three choices which you should consider. In this post I will highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each approach which can be considered when writing software for ST microcontrollers.

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A small operating system

There are many operating systems: Linux, Windows, iOS,… But there are a few which can work in real time like Linux Xenomai. However, there are very little which can fit a microcontroller. One of them is a FreeRTOS. There are some variations of the FreeRTOS which can handle different conditions and requirements.
This blog post is not about such operating system, however…

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