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I tried two different Radio Shacks here in Honolulu and they both had SeedStudio shields, TinkerKit shields, Netduino and even a Zigbee shield. I won't deny the smaller components are overpriced, but in Ottawa the most complex part I could find was a 555 or an OSEPP board or two.
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# ? Jan 30, 2013 23:53 |
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# ? May 13, 2024 10:27 |
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I'm trying to use my beaglebone, but I'm running in to trouble just trying to install emacs. I've been following this tutorial: http://www.gigamegablog.com/2012/01/29/beaglebone-linux-101-configuring-angstrom-linux/ and I'm trying to use "wget https://www.angstrom-distribution.org/feeds/2011.03/ipk/glibc/armv7a/base/emacs_22.3-r1.6_armv7a.ipk" but linux keeps telling me "wget: bad address 'www.angstrom-distribution.org'" and since I can't ping any IP addresses from the command line I assume my beaglebone isn't accessing the internet properly? The funny thing is that opkg update and opkg upgrade seemed to work just fine which I believe require accessing the internet. What am I doing wrong? Edit: Separate question, is there a C/C++ library that would let me do things like "pinMode(usr_LED0, output);" so that I don't have to use Java/Python/Cloud9, but could still control the IO pins really easily? Edit: vvvvvvvv no luck, quotes didn't help. Kire fucked around with this message at 04:20 on Jan 31, 2013 |
# ? Jan 31, 2013 04:16 |
Just for kicks, try putting single quotes around the url:code:
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# ? Jan 31, 2013 04:18 |
Kire posted:I'm trying to use my beaglebone, but I'm running in to trouble just trying to install emacs. I've been following this tutorial: If the beaglebone is like other embedded linux systems I've used, there should be gpio entries under /sys/class/gpio and you can modify them with any language capable of opening and writing to a file including commandline tools like echo or cat, along with bash, C, whatever. EDIT: Google says yes http://beaglebone.cameon.net/home/using-the-gpios I like just doing simple bash scripting, but you ought to be able to knock out a simple C++ library to hide most of the file i/o stuff.
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# ? Jan 31, 2013 05:21 |
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Is there a good general book on embedded programming design patterns? I feel like I always do things certain ways that are probably sub-optimal, at least compared to what smarter people come up with. I read libraries but a lot of the time they are either crap or else super duper arcane and tough to learn from. I feel like there's also a lot of little tricks that I just don't know and wouldn't figure out on my own or by reading code. Probably something focused more towards smaller micros and bare-metal stuff. Not so interested in embedded OSes right now. I guess some the big topic I would like are developing rock-solid serial drivers and protocols. But there's probably a whole bunch of other stuff.
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# ? Feb 19, 2013 21:04 |
evensevenone posted:Is there a good general book on embedded programming design patterns? I feel like I always do things certain ways that are probably sub-optimal, at least compared to what smarter people come up with. I read libraries but a lot of the time they are either crap or else super duper arcane and tough to learn from. I feel like there's also a lot of little tricks that I just don't know and wouldn't figure out on my own or by reading code. I feel that way all the time so I'm always looking for books and tutorials for new approaches to common design problems. I just bought a copy of this: http://www.amazon.com/Practical-UML-Statecharts-Second-Event-Driven/dp/0750687061 Coworker used a few techniques from this book and it looked useful enough to pick up. Gotta step my game up, this approach seems a lot more extendable and easier to document than my hacked together approaches previously.
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# ? Feb 19, 2013 21:08 |
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Funny, that's on my amazon wishlist along with this: http://www.amazon.com/Making-Embedded-Systems-Patterns-Software/dp/1449302149/ref=wl_mb_hu_m_2_dp I never know with O'Reilly books tough. Some are awesome and some are total duds.
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# ? Feb 19, 2013 21:22 |
evensevenone posted:Funny, that's on my amazon wishlist along with this: http://www.amazon.com/Making-Embedded-Systems-Patterns-Software/dp/1449302149/ref=wl_mb_hu_m_2_dp The statechart book arrived a few days ago so whenever I finish Effective C++ I will start on it and let you know if its any good. The O'Reilly book looks good and is on my list now too. Too much stuff to do, not nearly enough time to do it in
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# ? Feb 19, 2013 23:43 |
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Cornell posted their FPGA and uC design classes on youtube. Looks pretty good so far, but I haven't gotten through very much of it yet. 22 hours in the FPGA lecture, 24 hours in the Microcontroller lecture. FPGA (2011): https://www.youtube.com/course?list=EC2BA78454E71FF0E5 uC (2012): https://www.youtube.com/course?list=ECD7F7ED1F3505D8D5
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# ? Mar 9, 2013 18:14 |
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This looks too good to be true to me: http://www.sainsmart.com/new-nxp-arm-cortex-m3-lpc1768-development-board-3-2-tft-lcd-module-64kb-sram.html As does this (less so) http://www.sainsmart.com/arduino-co...-atmega8u2.html Is it sme sort of scam? I'm after a small CPU/display combo to toy around with and most kits seem vastly more expensive.
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# ? Mar 15, 2013 20:54 |
Cancelbot posted:This looks too good to be true to me: quote:Land Tiger development board supporting a wealth of routine and detailed information for users to quickly project development.
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# ? Mar 15, 2013 21:01 |
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Cancelbot posted:This looks too good to be true to me: They probably have poo poo quality control and nonexistant English documentation, but they'll probably work fine. The latter has been my big problem with cheap parts, especially screens, ordered from China. If they come with drivers for your uC then great, but unless you're fluent in technical Chinese, pray you never have to modify it or write your own.
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# ? Mar 15, 2013 21:24 |
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Thanks! I might risk it as I'm in the UK so everything microcontroller/lcd based is drat expensive. A hacked Nintendo DS might be more suitable & much cheaper for ARM graphics programming
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# ? Mar 15, 2013 21:55 |
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Arcsech posted:They probably have poo poo quality control and nonexistant English documentation, but they'll probably work fine. The latter has been my big problem with cheap parts, especially screens, ordered from China. If they come with drivers for your uC then great, but unless you're fluent in technical Chinese, pray you never have to modify it or write your own. I've brought quite a few STM32 Dev boards, one official one, and quite a few cheap Chinese boards. I found that the Chinese boards worked better than the official board in one very specific application(either by accident or by design). Sometimes the software provided is a bit hit or miss but if it doesn't work usually you can contact the seller to get a working version. In general they provide quite allot of code examples, data sheets, etc. There are also loads of STM32F103VE Dev boards so lots of code out there. I've used the following http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/MINI-STM32-Dev-Board-STM32F103VET6-512K-FLASH-64K-SRAM-/200486596368?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2eadeeaf10, which worked fine, the seller also has other boards with larger screens. I've had quite a few of the Chinese touch LCDs, and in general there are only a few LCD controllers used in these sort of displays, so finding startup code that works isn't usually a problem, and startup code for LCDs is easily portable between uC. (Or if you are hardcore you can write the startup code from the datasheet).
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# ? Mar 15, 2013 22:33 |
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About to purchase an Altera DE0 nano board. Am I getting myself into trouble? I know nothing about FPGA and hardware design and I don't really understand HDLs. Also what's a good book on hardware design + vhdl/verilog? Preferably something that doesn't shy away from the math.
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# ? Mar 16, 2013 00:43 |
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Malcolm XML posted:About to purchase an Altera DE0 nano board. Am I getting myself into trouble? The DE0 Nano is good if you kind of already know what you are doing.
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# ? Mar 17, 2013 14:15 |
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Dolex posted:Get a spartan S3 (http://www.xilinx.com/products/boards/s3_sk_promo.htm) and this book http://www.amazon.com/FPGA-Prototyping-VHDL-Examples-Spartan-3/dp/0470185317/ Those boards are also $200. The de0 is like $90. Thanks for the book suggestion--even though it says xilinx it seems that most of it will transfer to altera with no real issues.
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# ? Mar 17, 2013 16:42 |
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FPGA boards are not cheap. The time you spend banging your head against the DE0 will be that $110 dollars 10 times over. The S3 board also has a lot more features, and is more suited to actually learning. http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Catalog.cfm?NavPath=2,400&Cat=10&FPGA - here you can get it for slightly cheaper, and if you are in school you can get it for $159. Unless you know exactly what you want to do with it, the DE0 is best suited for collecting dust on a shelf. It's cheap for a reason.
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# ? Mar 18, 2013 14:30 |
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STM32F4xx goons: Would you care to describe your experience so far with the STM32F4xx? Getting started with the STM32F4xx has been a bit of a nightmare. First, STMicroelectronics seems to like creating lots of dead hyperlinks and other things; see this funny/sad account for some details. It seems like they just don't care about enabling startups to quickly and cheaply get up to speed on their chips.
Then there's programming the thing. dfu-util works just fine if you boot up with the manufacturer firmware (set via BOOT0,1), but things aren't so simple when using ST-LINK2. If you install openocd from Macports, you must specify the +stlink variant. Next, to properly flash the chip you apparently have to issue reset halt; if you don't, random flash locations (where the PC is? I didn't have the patience to check) wouldn't program. If you want to use gdb, note that it won't set breakpoints until you set "set breakpoint always-inserted", even if gdb is aware of hardware breakpoints. Yeah, you have to tell gdb, "no, really, when I say insert a breakpoint, I actually want you to INSERT A BREAKPOINT". At several points, once I figured out something I up and left work because I was so frustrated and was just happy I accomplished a single thing that day. Now, I don't have a ton of embedded experience; I had only used ATmega 8-bit AVR chips before (excepting a bit of FPGA dabbling). I actually started on them before Arduino came out, so I've used them both in Arduino form and non-Arduino form. But good grief, perhaps people could make things a bit easier to get started quickly and be off to the races? I propose an information exchange about the STM32F4xx series. We can probably include the other STM32's due to the amount of similarity. For example:
Victor fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Mar 23, 2013 |
# ? Mar 23, 2013 04:57 |
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http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~geobrown/book.pdf and this one was probably my favourite just because it lists a lot of cool stuff that an embedded newbie might have a hard time figuring out. Like the clock bootstrapping process, etc: http://www.hitex.com/fileadmin/pdf/insiders-guides/stm32/isg-stm32-v18d-scr.pdf Overall I found that ST really had no desire to get newbies interested in the ARM platform. TI has a ton of amazing tutorials on StellarisWare and gives you Code Composer Studio for free; NXP has less awesome tutorials but give you LPCXpresso, a cut down version of the Code Red IDE. I don't like StellarisWare (by virtue of being locked into a vendor's proprietary API) so I didn't go with TI, but NXP's stuff was pretty easy to get into. Overall it is just really difficult to get into ARM programming unless you're already sort of up on embedded development I think. There is such a drought of community support outside of a few niche unknown forums when compared to something like the Arduino. I've had to put my embedded stuff aside for the time being while I look for a job, but I have a quick prototype of my PCB exposure timer running on my LPCXpresso board already. It was really quick and easy once I got the hang of it, but I won't lie and say it was a cakewalk to get started As far as libraries go, I tried not to use any. I know I probably made things a lot harder on myself by not using StellarisWare or something, but I was determined to figure out how to bitbang registers to get what I wanted done. I think this is the best way to go about it if you plan to use multiple chip families. I guess there's really no reason to, once you find a family you like, but I am really against being locked into one specific vendor. To be honest though, it's not really that difficult to bitbang registers to get things done. Most of the M3 chips I worked with pretty much had the same general flow for getting things done, even if the register fields were numerically different or something. some kinda jackal fucked around with this message at 05:08 on Mar 23, 2013 |
# ? Mar 23, 2013 05:05 |
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Victor posted:STM32F4xx goons: Would you care to describe your experience so far with the STM32F4xx? Hey great idea! I haven't used an STM32 yet, but I just got a job where it looks like I'll be doing quite a bit (so far I've just worked with smaller micros, AVR and PIC). I was thinking of picking up one of those dev boards, either a Discovery or the Chinese boards (or maybe both) to play with on my off time. I'll try to add resources as I learn about them. Does anyone have suggestion about using a discovery with a breadboard? The dual headers look a little annoying. There's also this but I'm not sure what I'd be giving up.
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# ? Mar 24, 2013 23:29 |
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evensevenone posted:Does anyone have suggestion about using a discovery with a breadboard? The dual headers look a little annoying. Dual headers: Very annoying I have the above STM32F3Discoevry. They're both M4 cortex uCs, you just have to go look up the feature set for the specific chips.
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# ? Mar 24, 2013 23:38 |
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evensevenone posted:There's also this but I'm not sure what I'd be giving up.
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# ? Mar 25, 2013 03:12 |
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Who gave you the george clooney avatar, Victor?
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# ? Mar 25, 2013 03:35 |
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Otto Skorzeny posted:Who gave you the george clooney avatar, Victor?
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# ? Mar 25, 2013 04:04 |
This looks to be pretty interesting, making my way through the first lecture. Recently graduated and am now working in firmware/BIOS/embedded OS land, but I always loved doing Verilog design and hope to get back into it as a career. I'm not sure how far anyone has gotten into this series but does it cover Verilog synthesis thoroughly? Or translation of netlists into FPGA logic?
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# ? Mar 25, 2013 06:09 |
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This isn't about embedded programming per-se, but I have a question about analog-digital converters for regular PCs. Specifically, what are some good ones out there? I see a few and can't really make up my mind. I was hoping to find something in the short term that takes a signal from the range of 0-5V, samples it very rapidly, like > 10Hz, and has > 8bit precision. Has anybody worked with anything like this before for situations like this?
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# ? Mar 25, 2013 19:06 |
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:This isn't about embedded programming per-se, but I have a question about analog-digital converters for regular PCs. Specifically, what are some good ones out there? I see a few and can't really make up my mind. I was hoping to find something in the short term that takes a signal from the range of 0-5V, samples it very rapidly, like > 10Hz, and has > 8bit precision. Has anybody worked with anything like this before for situations like this? Basically anything will do that, because 10Hz is comically slow, and 8 bits is, like, the minimum you'd ever see. Realistically, it depends on what you want to do with it. If you just want to make some measurements one time, then basically anything is fine, but if you need to integrate it with existing software (necessitating that it makes multiple drivers available), it becomes more expensive. Stuff from National Instruments is basically the default, at least here at work, but they're somewhat pricey for what they actually do.
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# ? Mar 25, 2013 19:25 |
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:This isn't about embedded programming per-se, but I have a question about analog-digital converters for regular PCs. Specifically, what are some good ones out there? I see a few and can't really make up my mind. I was hoping to find something in the short term that takes a signal from the range of 0-5V, samples it very rapidly, like > 10Hz, and has > 8bit precision. Has anybody worked with anything like this before for situations like this? At 0V-5V, 8-bit, and 10Hz, your easiest cheap solution is probably to just buy an Arduino and have it send the ADC reading over serial 10 times per second.
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# ? Mar 25, 2013 19:27 |
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Martytoof posted:Dual headers: Very annoying Yeah, I'm just going to buy one of these for now. http://www.digikey.com/product-search/en?mpart=STM32F0DISCOVERY&vendor=497 Actually I'll probably just buy both and figure out how to deal with the dual headers later.
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# ? Mar 25, 2013 20:20 |
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Pardon my ignorance, but what is the issue with dual headers? Is it basically that you can't easily plug the whole board into a breadboard? I made a little custom adapter to hook up the dual headers on my Raspberry Pi to a breadboard (although Adafruit sells one under the name "Cobbler"). I suppose it was a bit of a pain, and would be a larger pain on a board with more pins.
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# ? Mar 25, 2013 20:39 |
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That's pretty much it. There's no way to plug it into a breadboard without shorting each pair of pins. At least with single headers you can either use one breadboard (admittedly a little cramped), or two separate breadboards with lots of room to grow. This is like the best of neither and the worst of both.
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# ? Mar 25, 2013 20:58 |
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armorer posted:Pardon my ignorance, but what is the issue with dual headers? Is it basically that you can't easily plug the whole board into a breadboard? I made a little custom adapter to hook up the dual headers on my Raspberry Pi to a breadboard (although Adafruit sells one under the name "Cobbler"). I suppose it was a bit of a pain, and would be a larger pain on a board with more pins. No, that's basically it. When I had the time back in school (and couldn't spend extra money), I made similar adapters for dual-row headers on LCD boards and AVR programmers using a bit of protoboard and headers pilfered from the electronics lab / ECE dept. / robot club. The only problem is that it's still kinda inelegant (your adapter covers up a lot of space on the breadboard), and homemade ones never have the proper spacing which means you gotta spend time bending leads until they fit.
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# ? Mar 25, 2013 21:02 |
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It never occurred to me to stick half into one breadboard and half into a second. It seems so obvious now - thanks for that! With the raspberry pi you have a 26pin dual header, so I just ran a ribbon cable to a little adapter that spaces the header pins wide enough to span the center of a breadboard. That isn't really viable on something like this with so many pins though.
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# ? Mar 25, 2013 21:06 |
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Arcsech posted:At 0V-5V, 8-bit, and 10Hz, your easiest cheap solution is probably to just buy an Arduino and have it send the ADC reading over serial 10 times per second. https://www.dataq.com/products/startkit/di145.html
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# ? Mar 25, 2013 21:47 |
Rocko Bonaparte posted:This isn't about embedded programming per-se, but I have a question about analog-digital converters for regular PCs. Specifically, what are some good ones out there? I see a few and can't really make up my mind. I was hoping to find something in the short term that takes a signal from the range of 0-5V, samples it very rapidly, like > 10Hz, and has > 8bit precision. Has anybody worked with anything like this before for situations like this? A bus pirate can also take ADC readings much faster than 10Hz and stream them over the serial port to the PC. It's overkill for just this, but not a bad idea if you think you could reuse the tool later.
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# ? Mar 25, 2013 21:56 |
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Martytoof posted:That's pretty much it. There's no way to plug it into a breadboard without shorting each pair of pins. At least with single headers you can either use one breadboard (admittedly a little cramped), or two separate breadboards with lots of room to grow. This is like the best of neither and the worst of both. The worst thing is that there aren't holes for standoffs and the header the pins are longer on the bottom than the top, so it would be perfect it you could just snap it into a breadboard. It's a really ridiculous number of pins, too. I don't have a soldering station at home right now so it really limits me in terms of what kind of adapters I can cobble together, too.
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# ? Mar 25, 2013 22:08 |
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Malcolm XML posted:About to purchase an Altera DE0 nano board. Am I getting myself into trouble?
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# ? Mar 27, 2013 22:43 |
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Does anyone use Studio 6? Even my Atmel reference design comes with EWARM toolchain support instead. I've hacked it around to the point where it's compiling, but some interrupt isn't getting routed and I'm weighing figuring out Studio 6 or just grabbing EWARM if that's what people actually use.
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# ? Apr 9, 2013 08:26 |
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# ? May 13, 2024 10:27 |
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That doesn't sound like an IDE issue. Studio 6 just uses avr-gcc which should be pretty solid. Not sure what EWARM uses. As for your issue, there shouldn't be a whole lot to it. Have enabled interrupts with sei()? Have you written a handler with ISR() ? Is the interrupt itself disabled somehow?
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# ? Apr 9, 2013 08:38 |