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Right. I've picked up one of those, I guess I'd better get reading up on things for the next 5-15 days while it's delivered.
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Feb 5, 2014 06:37
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Cool, keep us updated. I wish I still had my code for my final year PIC project that included an SD card for extra space. It was pretty clever (read: hackish and loving stupid)
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Feb 5, 2014 06:49
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What's the best choice device for learning / playing with? I've been working on a pcb design and I'm about ready to get it made by OSH Park. In the short term I just need to be able to write to a couple of pins every couple milliseconds. In the long term I'd like to be able to take the code that I've written and port it to a standalone device/microcontroller without too much work. Linux + Open source is good. I've been thinking about a Beaglebone black, but would I be able to say write a program on it and then port it to a smaller avr? Or should I be looking at an arduino or something like that? poo poo, is buying a cheap rear end DIP avr and a breadboard/Jtag just as good? I'm not looking to do anything too complicated in the near or far future.
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Feb 6, 2014 02:57
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Tres Burritos posted:What's the best choice device for learning / playing with? I've been working on a pcb design and I'm about ready to get it made by OSH Park. In the short term I just need to be able to write to a couple of pins every couple milliseconds. In the long term I'd like to be able to take the code that I've written and port it to a standalone device/microcontroller without too much work. Linux + Open source is good. I'm a fan of the STM32 discovery boards. Some of them are as cheap as $15, and they have an STLink V2 debugger on board which is nice. They also have a header and can be used to program other boards with STM32s as well.
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Feb 6, 2014 03:00
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Aurium posted:What kinds of things are you doing with the piccolo? Implementing a PID control loop to keep something at a constant temperature. Unfortunately my attempts to implement the P, I, and D parts of the PID loop made it way worse than when I was simply telling the PWM's duty cycle "Increase duty cycle a bit if the value is too low. If the value is too high lower the duty cycle a bit". The Piccolo has a "Control Law Accelerator", a specially designed CPU with FPU that is custom made for control loops, according to the docs. However, there's no compiler so as TI optimistically says in their sales brochures "It is fully programmable in assembly!"  I think I can implement what I need on the main CPU though and have it work well enough, even without an FPU.
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Feb 6, 2014 03:14
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reading posted:The Piccolo has a "Control Law Accelerator", a specially designed CPU with FPU that is custom made for control loops, according to the docs. However, there's no compiler so as TI optimistically says in their sales brochures "It is fully programmable in assembly!" That's hilarious. I read some of the marketing stuff that came out with the piccolo launchpad and waited a while to see if anyone would be able to take advantage of it's second core. TI put out some interesting demos that made it look really capable. So I've kind of wondered why there are basically no projects that have done anything with it. Tres Burritos posted:What's the best choice device for learning / playing with? I've been working on a pcb design and I'm about ready to get it made by OSH Park. In the short term I just need to be able to write to a couple of pins every couple milliseconds. In the long term I'd like to be able to take the code that I've written and port it to a standalone device/microcontroller without too much work. Linux + Open source is good. For something that simple you could use just about anything, but the approaches between a uC like an avr vs a beaglebone would make the resulting program pretty different. For non trivial things it isn't really a situation you'd really be be porting between. The scale between having a full os and a single thread with no os is really quite large. It can be done, Things like program flow are universal. You just look at it from a different angle. Also when you need some kind of multithreading in a uC you usually find a RTOS you like or a state machine, which can further remove it from larger computers. So really where do you see your projects going? Do they need lots of CPU, like computer vision? Are your projects describable as computer and a thing? Do you really like programming linux? All of those are reasons to go with the beaglebone. An avr (or pic or stm32 or msp430) would usually be something that's more standalone, a bunch of lights. Sensor monitoring. Some machinery controller. A little robot. If you've never done anything like it before, it's hard to call an arduino a bad choice. It's exceptionally fast to get running. It simplifies some things, and when you out grow those simplifications you can use it just like any other avr.
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Feb 6, 2014 03:53
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Aurium posted:So really where do you see your projects going? Do they need lots of CPU, like computer vision? Are your projects describable as computer and a thing? Do you really like programming linux? All of those are reasons to go with the beaglebone. An avr (or pic or stm32 or msp430) would usually be something that's more standalone, a bunch of lights. Sensor monitoring. Some machinery controller. A little robot. Definetly the latter. The more I think about it what I'm really looking for is a microcontroller that has dev tools that are free and worth a drat. Does Atmel studio stack up? It looks like it has an okay debugger. So with atmel studio I could use a JTAG cable to flash and debug, and I wouldn't have to worry about compilers? I messed around with PIC for a while and I vaguely recall that you had to like purchase compilers, is that not the case for AVR?
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Feb 6, 2014 04:25
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Tres Burritos posted:Definetly the latter. The more I think about it what I'm really looking for is a microcontroller that has dev tools that are free and worth a drat. Does Atmel studio stack up? It looks like it has an okay debugger. I'm pretty happy using Atmel Studio. I used it with external makefiles which probably caused my debugger annoyances by not compiling with the settings it expected. Never tried with a native project, but I imagine it's pretty slick.
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Feb 6, 2014 05:48
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Atmel Studio is basically a customized version of Visual Studio which is great as far as IDEs go. AVR uses a custom version of GCC and has flash utilities and all that.
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Feb 6, 2014 07:08
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Aurium posted:That's hilarious. The math library they include with it only has trig functions, which as far as I can see have almost no relation to Control Laws which is what you'd expect for a Control Law Accelerator. The math libs make it a Trigonometry Accelerator. The main CPU operates at 80MHz which I expect will be just fine for my 100kHz PWM controller, even without an FPU. If I were going to code an extra core in assembly then I may as well use the PRU (the two hidden cores) in the beaglebone. EDIT: After working on this thing for a few minutes this morning, I got the code which previously wouldn't work or run to work just by adding a breakpoint. CCS is a weird beast, and I notice that sometimes in the debug/"run" mode I have to hit play, pause, play, and then it works. Other times I have to reset the thing a few times before the chip runs. It's like CCS isn't always able to start the chip after flashing it with the new program, it has to be manually jump-started like an old lawnmower. I do really like CCS' built in graphing ability though. Being able to come back from lunch and see a great graph of a watched expression is useful. I haven't yet tried out the scripting ability to run a sequence of tests. reading fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Feb 7, 2014 |
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Feb 7, 2014 17:06
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What do I need to buy to be able to do on-chip debugging with my Arduino? I'm using Atmel Studio, not the Arduino software.
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Feb 8, 2014 07:53
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Luigi Thirty posted:What do I need to buy to be able to do on-chip debugging with my Arduino? I'm using Atmel Studio, not the Arduino software. AVR Dragon
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Feb 8, 2014 09:06
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Atmel Studio & Dragon is great. I think there was some touchy-ness with the debugwire mode, there's some guides on how to do it without getting the control stuck in no-ISP mode. And you have to watch what circuitry you have on the reset pin. People bitched like crazy over on the avrfreaks forums about the new VS-based studio. But VS2010 is freaking fantastic compared to most embedded software IDEs.
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Feb 9, 2014 03:03
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Rescue Toaster posted:Atmel Studio & Dragon is great. I think there was some touchy-ness with the debugwire mode, there's some guides on how to do it without getting the control stuck in no-ISP mode. And you have to watch what circuitry you have on the reset pin. Yeah I briefly tried out PIC and their IDE and that thing was loving awful.
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Feb 9, 2014 03:21
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Is there a way to get TI's CCS to show me the assembly output without a target present? This is a stupid question but searches either end up on the Disassembly pane, which appears to require a target present to populate, or in Assembler-only project directions, which don't apply since I'm working in C. I have some questions about how things are getting laid out in memory that would be trivial to check if I had the assembly listing easily available.
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Feb 10, 2014 23:23
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ImDifferent posted:Little microcontroller-based CTF hacking competition: This is a ton of fun. Just got to the 100-point levels.
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Feb 10, 2014 23:27
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JawnV6 posted:My hardware guy didn't even give me LED's on the last board. Why do you need LEDs, you have a debugger and a scope to probe a test-point / some other pin of you need it?  - hw guy
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Feb 10, 2014 23:48
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movax posted:Why do you need LEDs, you have a debugger and a scope to probe a test-point / some other pin of you need it? Our hardware guys think actual testpoints are a luxury that we do not deserve (or if they do, they hide them underneath daughterboards / on the underside of boards mounted to test fixtures)
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Feb 10, 2014 23:53
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Slanderer posted:Our hardware guys think actual testpoints are a luxury that we do not deserve (or if they do, they hide them underneath daughterboards / on the underside of boards mounted to test fixtures) Blame the layout guy. He saw that big area with a low clearance and that's the perfect place to put all those zero height test points.
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Feb 11, 2014 00:01
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Slanderer posted:Our hardware guys think actual testpoints are a luxury that we do not deserve (or if they do, they hide them underneath daughterboards / on the underside of boards mounted to test fixtures) I do a lot of my own layout these days, and I usually layout things in a way that will make my life easier in ~two weeks when I'm in the lab doing bring-up on the drat thing. No reason to make myself suffer, so it's usually win-win-win! Except I'm fighting an up-hill battle at my new job in terms of making readable schematics...we've got guys treating it like software and making these ridiculously over-abstracted hierarchical abortions where you can't even use Ctrl+F to follow net names around the schematic 
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Feb 11, 2014 00:55
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Tiger.Bomb posted:This is a ton of fun. Just got to the 100-point levels. I managed to get 115 points, but now am completely stuck. I don't know if I'm suppose to use the techniques already used in creative ways or if there are new techniques I should be using but I have a knowledge gap.
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Feb 11, 2014 19:49
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Tiger.Bomb posted:This is a ton of fun. Just got to the 100-point levels. This is pretty rad. The lovely browser at work is making it slow and some solutions just don't work (enter the same password twice and it works the second time...). I'll play with this more when I get home.
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Feb 11, 2014 22:53
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FSMC posted:I managed to get 115 points, but now am completely stuck. I don't know if I'm suppose to use the techniques already used in creative ways or if there are new techniques I should be using but I have a knowledge gap. You can drop by freenode/#uctf for hints if you get stuck.
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Feb 11, 2014 22:57
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FSMC posted:I managed to get 115 points, but now am completely stuck. I don't know if I'm suppose to use the techniques already used in creative ways or if there are new techniques I should be using but I have a knowledge gap. The first ten levels are _very_ basic. You're pretty much always doing some kind of overflow. Figuring out what you need to overflow it with is the trick.
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Feb 12, 2014 00:42
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Tiger.Bomb posted:The first ten levels are _very_ basic. You're pretty much always doing some kind of overflow. Figuring out what you need to overflow it with is the trick. I just got to the first overflow level. I need to remember to look at the conditions for unlock before digging into the login/password function. Hanoi would have been much faster if I had approached it that way.
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Feb 12, 2014 00:51
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I'm up to about 665 points, but haven't touched it in a while. It started to exceed the amount of time I'm willing to put into it  Favourite so far: Alphanumeric-only shellcode
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Feb 12, 2014 02:40
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What exactly is shellcode? It's not bash scripting? I've heard it has something to do with virus shells? what?
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Feb 12, 2014 05:08
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ImDifferent posted:I'm up to about 665 points, but haven't touched it in a while. It started to exceed the amount of time I'm willing to put into it I'm curious how you completed that one, Lagos right? I completed it without the alphanumeric code since I gave up trying to work with only a few usable op codes, so it'd be interesting to see what one would look like. How many bytes? Could you pm me your input for it if you feel like sharing? I've gotten to Chernobyl but it's to that point as well, too much time I'm willing to put into it at the moment.
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Feb 12, 2014 05:22
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reading posted:What exactly is shellcode? It's not bash scripting? I've heard it has something to do with virus shells? what? It's basically [text] input that will later be interpreted as code. The name comes from the fact that typically the code does not a lot more than spawn a shell (at the permission level of the application you exploited)
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Feb 12, 2014 07:03
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Tiger.Bomb posted:The first ten levels are _very_ basic. You're pretty much always doing some kind of overflow. Figuring out what you need to overflow it with is the trick. Thanks for ruining the sense of accomplishment I got from doing the first eight levels 
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Feb 12, 2014 17:37
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Speaking of things that aren't basic. Has anyone used ChibiOS? I'm getting a crash at startup and it looks like it is switching to a corrupted context. It started out frequently happening at startup, but now it's maybe a 1/50 sort of thing. I had a similar problem when I first set the project up and it was related to interrupt stacks, and it being intermittent is driving me crazy.
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Feb 12, 2014 18:29
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Have to give some props to MAKE: AVR Programming: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920028161.do Pretty good book for idiots like me. Explains a lot of things in detail. If you're new to embedded development and want to learn AVR stuff, this one seems pretty solid from my initial readthough.
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Feb 12, 2014 21:43
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BobaFett posted:Could you pm me your input for it if you feel like sharing? PM'd. hosed if I can remember how it worked. Took me a good while to figure out, that's all I can remember.
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Feb 13, 2014 05:49
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ante posted:Thanks for ruining the sense of accomplishment I got from doing the first eight levels haha every level I pass makes the others feel super easy. Still an accomplishment, they just seem so obvious after.
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Feb 15, 2014 01:12
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Finally got my Dragon, got my shift register, 4-digit LED, thermal sensor, big box of resistors, plugged a wire one hole off on the breadboard, plugged it in, and promptly blew up the ATMega. Time to shell out for that clone with fuses on every pin I guess.
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Feb 16, 2014 03:08
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Sure you killed it? The ATMEGAs are actually quite hardy, unless you drive it with a high amperage over a long period of time. Usually you end up killing the I/O driver for the GPIO pin you connected to incorrectly, but the core and other I/Os survive. Of course once done the chip is suspect and should be replaced as possible, but it might limp on for testing in the meantime.
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Feb 16, 2014 03:32
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Vcc/gnd swap?
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Feb 16, 2014 04:16
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EpicCodeMonkey posted:Sure you killed it? The ATMEGAs are actually quite hardy, unless you drive it with a high amperage over a long period of time. Usually you end up killing the I/O driver for the GPIO pin you connected to incorrectly, but the core and other I/Os survive. Of course once done the chip is suspect and should be replaced as possible, but it might limp on for testing in the meantime. The board connects and shows up on my computer but I get a flash memory error when I try to write a test program to it. I just ordered a new chip since they're $4 and I have the programming board to write a bootloader.
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Feb 16, 2014 05:06
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Delta-Wye posted:Vcc/gnd swap? Ah the memories. I have done this or other similar mistakes. Thankfully, I use the PIC. I can always order more free samples. Both sides have vastly profited from this arrangement.
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Feb 16, 2014 05:46
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Well, the arm-none-eabi toolchain has come a long way in ease of use. I was able to setup Eclipse 4.3, the arm plugin, the toolchain, openocd, and run hello world on my old stm32f4discovery in about 30 minutes (on windows, even). Pretty nice! I wonder if the best way to get the various headers and cpu-specific stuff is to install atollic and rip it out of there. Rescue Toaster fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Feb 16, 2014 |
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Feb 16, 2014 19:36
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