I work as a Software Development Engineer in Mentor Graphics’ Sourcery CodeBench IDE backend team. It is an Eclipse based development suite to program microprocessors. What is an Embedded System IDE Development of software for a microprocessor (or an embedded system) – or firmware development, consists of three phases: Programming Debugging Optimization
Month: August 2016
Robocup SPL 2015 – BEE Final Year Project
Robocup – the World Cup of Robotics, is an international competition held annually, with an aim to promote research in robotics. Its Standard Platform League (SPL) is a soccer competition between teams of fully autonomous humanoid robots. The hardware platform for Robocup SPL is Aldebaran Robotics (now Softbank Robotics) NAO robot. Identical
ESP8266 flashing hardware setup
My past few days have been spent attempting ESP8266 flashing and running blinky . Considering how I have a working firmware from my NodeMCU experiment, I considered this to be quick. I was mistaken, obviously. Some of the important lessons learnt are shared below: ESP8266 Power Source The first consideration is
NodeMCU Sample Projects
First step in exploring the state of firmware already developed is to run a few sample codes on a stable ESP8266 device. I will be compiling and running a few NodeMCU sample projects to familiarize myself with the workflow. See the NodeMCU in action in the video below: This post assumes that you
ESP8266 IoT Platform
I am working on developing an ESP8266 IoT (Internet of Things) platform. I have shared some of my experiences and salient outcomes in the blog posts linked below: ESP8266 WiFi SoC – what is it all about (2016-08-16) Build Toolchain for ESP8266 (2016-08-17) Firmware Efforts NodeMCU Sample Projects – Blinky and ESP8266_RTOS_SDK Multithreading (2016-08-20) Hardware
Build Toolchain for ESP8266
Initiating developing on ESP8266 requires a toolchain capable of cross compiling for the target. Click here for a target agnostic guide to building a cross compiler toolchain. Following the tutorial located at https://github.com/pfalcon/esp-open-sdk which provides a seamless script to automate the whole process. Get the dependencies: sudo apt-get install make unrar autoconf
ESP8266 WiFi SoC – what is it all about
ESP8266 is a system on chip (SoC) comprising a built-in WiFi module, 32 bit micro-controller and related peripherals. A TCP/IP networking stack can be run by the microcontroller to take care intricacies related to WiFi, making this device capable of working as a standalone WiFi node. The fact that an
Cross Compiler Toolchain – how to build from scratch
What is a Cross Compiler Compilation is the process of generating machine code to be executed on a processor. Typically, we compile and execute code on the same machine. However, this is not the case in some instances, especially for embedded systems where the target system (e.g. Arduino) is not
My first open source contribution to QEMU
I am glad to step into the open source community with my first contribution to QEMU. For my introduction to and understanding so far about the open source community, click here. What is QEMU QEMU is an open source machine emulator, allowing users to specify a range of properties to
Open source software projects workability
What is open source software By definition, source code for “open” source software is available for public at large to use, modify and contribute to. Using the software, or the source code as programmers do, makes sense; given the level of stability, functionality and maturity some of the open source