Project Updates 6 / 20 /12

There have been several big developments in our projects that I would like to make our followers aware. First, Jorel has placed schematics and documentation on his LED board. Checkout the repo to see all the glorious ASCII Art in his documentation. Second, I have placed a basic tutorial for circuit theory, and a modified copy of Paul Falstad's Analog Circuit Simulator under the CIRCUITS_TUTORIAL folder in the repo. You can use these to test general circuits and learn some mathematical and conceptual theory about circuits.

Finally is some major development in general project direction. We are going to focus heavily on creating practical projects, both small and large, and teach the relevant theory within the scope of projects. This means we will largely be diverging from the format of a typical textbook for our circuit theory, which I am okay with. After this first basic tutorial was completed, no matter how good it is at instilling conceptual information, I did not feel it was adequate and I think that learning purely through practical examples is a better medium for learning, or certainly a viable alternative to a traditional text. This is all in line with our original set goals, but I feel this implementation is much better. After all, we are not going to introduce students to electronics better by making a traditional text, just because it's free. So, with that in mind, look forward to some cool projects and designs which we will be churning out.

Our First Presentation

I felt our first presentation was very informative and very cool. Usually those two things don't go hand in hand. I laid out the goals of our project, and Jorel dazzled RCOS with his RGB tile prototype, totally controlled by the launchpad. I also used a Launchpad to navigate my slides using a Python script to read serial and translate it into computer actions. The slides are posted here, but for the grand tour I would recommend the video, you get a better idea of what we have in mind and you get to see the cool things we demonstrated with the launchpad. Although, at ~30 mins, I cannot call our presentation brief, so if you want to skim through the slides and skip to exciting part of the presentation, start at the 20:00 mark (Jorel's RGB light tile is not to be missed !!!). Preceding this is very cool information about timers and PWM, so the student in me wants you to watch that too. So, let's start watching.

The slides:

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The video ( 33:44 ):

A note on running CCS under Linux

The main point of this post is the problem of running Code Composer Studio under Linux. I think CCS is a fantastic IDE, open source or not, and it is our default platform for our code, but running it under anything but Windows is quite problematic. But, for Linux users, there's usually always a workaround, and for programming the microcontroller, this comes in the form of alternate output files.

CCS has predefined steps that allow you to create an Intel hex file or TI txt file, which can then be loaded onto the microcontroller using mspdebug like so:

> mspdebug rf2500
> prog file.hex

so, how do we accomplish this? Simply open up a project in CCS, then follow these commands:

1. Click the "Project" dropdown in the toolbar near the top of the window.

2. Click "Properties" (should be all the way at the bottom)

3. A new window will pop up. In the directory tree on the left, Click "Build"

4. Now you should see a screen with several tabs. click the one which says "Steps"

5. Now In the window at the bottom there is an option "Apply Predefined Step"

6. Now you can pick between an Intel Hex or TI txt image. The choice is yours, there's no difference is size or speed.

7. Now clean and build the project, and you will have a flash image to program.

8.your image is in the Debug folder of your project. Navigate to this folder, and use the mspdebug commands at the beginning of the post.

9. (Optional) Buy and consume hot fries, rosemary and olive oil triscuits or other snackitudinal accoutrements, because you're done.

And that's it for programming. I'm currently working on a reliable way to actively debug the microcontroller (look at the contents of the registers). That's another major hurdle.

Expect a more code-related post this week, I pretty much have my environment set up for Linux (Ubuntu definitely works, and I am working my way through getting it to work on openSUSE (which rocks, and you all should get it)). That's it for now, tune in next time.

43oh-my !

Wow, we caught 43oh.com's eye when we are barely off the ground. Truly, we are grateful, but we hope we aren't being misrepresented. While our intentions were properly stated, I feel our officiousness was overstated. I want to make it clear that while as a member of RCOS (Rensselaer Center for Open-Source Software) we hope to make a top-notch comprehensive lab-based curriculum fit for an official course, we are not affiliated with any official RPI course at this time. That being said, we are beginning full-time work on the project, so make sure to follow the repository at

web address:
http://code.google.com/p/embedded-electronics/source/browse/

clone:

svn co http://embedded-electronics.googlecode.com/svn/

And again,thank you so much, having 43oh's support means so much. we hope we can teach this thriving community a thing or two through our work.