STM’s STM32 F3 series of microcontrollers offer 32-bit performance with DSP functionality. To make the evaluation of this microcontroller easier, STMicroelectronics offers an evaluation board called the STM32F3DISCOVERY. If you have ever wanted to experiment with an RISC microcontroller that comes with special Digital Signal Processing (DSP) capability, the STM32F3DISCOVERY board might just be the … [Read more…]
Freescale’s new low-cost development platform FRDM-KL25Z featuring Freescale Semiconductor’s ARM® Cortex™-M0+ processor-based high performance, low-power Kinetis L series 32-bit MCUs has launched last Tuesday. Let’s check it out. The FRDM-KL25Z “Freedom” development platform is an extremely inexpensive development board with a Kinetis KL2 Family 32-bit ARM®CortexTM-M0+ MCU [1]. The Kinetis L-Series MCUs promise true 32-bit … [Read more…]
Freescale announced a new line of ARM® Cortex™-M0+ based microcontrollers, the Kinetis L Series. The MCUs are supposed to offer the performance of a real 32-bit MCU at the price and energy rating of an 8-bit microcontroller. A tight budget and low power requirements used to limit design engineers to 8-bit and 16-bit MCUs. Freescale’s … [Read more…]
Circuits with flashing LEDs and amazing color combinations are pretty popular. This is probably because they are not only simple but one can literally see the results instantly. Let’s have a look at a microcontroller controlled police strobe light using an ATtiny45 from Atmel. LED flashing circuits have been around for ages and probably always … [Read more…]
The most common way to ‘kill’ a Atmel AVR microcontroller is by programming fuse bits wrong. Sooner or later every Atmel AVR enthusiast will stumble across a fuse-bit related problem. The most common mistake, a wrong clock source selection through the CKSEL fuse-bit, can be fixed easily. The fuse-bits CKSEL0 through CKSEL3 let the microcontroller … [Read more…]
More and more computers (especially laptops) aren’t equipped with serial and / or parallel ports anymore. Therefore, more and more programming interfaces utilize USB instead. However, some people are extremely attached to their older serial / parallel programmers and often oversee how a USB based device can simplify their life a lot. Atmels’s AVRISP mkII … [Read more…]