While we expect our students to use the Espressif IDE software in the Lassonde labs, on computers provided by the School, they should also feel enabled to install the software on their own machines. The following is a description of what I did to get it to work on my macOS machine. Note that once […]
When contemplating how to use Firmata with Java, consider some of the following things: Your Main Project will look something like this (this is an older video that doesn't quite reflect changes to the updated project): Install Firmata on your device To do any of this you'll need to install Firmata: Using the OLED display […]
If you're trying to use Firmata4j and get an Exception in thread "main" java.lang.IndexOutOfBoundsException: Index 4 out of bounds for length 0 message, it may be because you downloaded StandardFirmata via the Arduino 2.0 IDE. At this stage, I'm not sure of the cause. I've determined that a solution for this is to use the […]
This is going to be a short post. Over the past couple of days I've been exploring the RP2350 and the Arduino IDE as a possible tool for teaching computer architecture. In the morning I've been turning on my macOS machine and have been faced with this: What's causing the issue? I'm not sure. But […]
It's easy to get caught in weird assembler errors. This is made more difficult if you don't have a background debugger and need to use a boot loader / serial monitor to debug your system. Sometimes that's all you have. So here is a suggestion for a C++ and Assembler file pair to check to […]
It was bound to happen. The Seeed Studio RP2350 is not connecting to the Arduino IDE. I'll go out on a limb here and chalk this up to the boot loader having an issue after I tried to get it to spit out serial data or maybe it was because I was trying to get […]
In engineering education there is an ever-present problem with technology-anchored pedagogy: when do you switch from current technology to the next one? Right now, the cool kid on the block in the RISC-V architecture. Will it be the next ARM or will it be the next PowerPC or MIPS? It's hard to tell. However, a […]
I'm more and more impressed by the selection of RISC-V processors out there. The ESP32 families of microcontrollers are found in some pretty impressive systems like M5Stack. The availability of WiFi and Bluetooth radios make them ideal development platforms for IoT. But here is a really cool thing. The ESP32-C6 RISC-V microcontroller has a single […]
Microcontrollers are usually programmed in C, a traditional programming language that dates back to the 1970s. Here I'll talk about a specific type of microcontroller family, the PIC16 (or PIC18) and the compiler options for it. XC8 supports C89, C90 and C99 (for PIC16/18) When programming an 8-bit PIC like a PIC16 or PIC18, it's […]
This is a quick little post on M5Stack embedded hardware. I'm going to use the Arduino 2 IDE with the M5Stack Timer Camera F in this example. I just opened up the Arduino IDE and updated the boards and libraries. I had previously installed the M5Stack library on the Arduino IDE. I'm going to see […]