Posts

Posted on

STM32F7 Setup – Griffin Haas

I wanted to share some of the insight I’ve got over the past couple weeks. Our group has selected the STM32F7 as our microprocessor for our project. We were looking for something reasonably cheap, as close to bare metal as possible (no OS), for audio DSP. The STM version of the ARM cortex m7 we got is the STM32F746 on this discovery board.
It is reasonably priced at $50 and comes with many peripherals and the drivers for them. This board isn’t supported by Platform.io (another good resource) so programming it with all of ST’s HAL (hardware abstraction layer) drivers was a little daunting at first. The moral of the story is I tried ARM’s Keil uVision IDE as well as an eclipse plugin to program and flash the board. ARM’s Keil uVision was fairly easy to setup but their lite version of the IDE only lets you compile and link 32kB projects. This is unfortunate because the professional version costs $1500/year for a license. Eclipse surely works but I had many issues trying to get the environment setup.
The setup we ended up going with is using visualgdb with visual studio.
While it’s not free they have a 30 day free trail and at $50 with the academic discount is much more affordable than ARM-MDK.
This tutorial is very straight forward compared to setting up eclipse.
Posted on

Event Planning 11/20

Tuesday (11/20) at 6:00 pm is the final Embedded CoP meeting. We will use the time to plan events for next term. Please bring a laptop and some ideas about events that you would like to organize for next term! If you can’t make it at that time, please add your input via Slack by the end of the week (11/23).
For senior design students, this is required to get credit for your professional development assignment.

Senior design students:

As a reminder, this is what you all need to do in order to get credit for your professional development assignment:
  • Attend most meetings (at least 2) – I keep track of this
  • Generate some online content (website and/or Slack posts) – if you directly edit the website, let me know via Slack
  • Correspond with a mentor (academic, industry, or student if applicable) – send me evidence of correspondence via Slack (directly to me, not just in general)
  • Add portfolio to the website – include at minimum a brief bio, skills, and resume
  • Complete member survey – I will send this out after our final meeting via email
  • Participate in an event/project – participate in the event planning on 11/20 or via Slack by 11/23
If you have been participating in meetings this term, you should be on track! If you have any questions, message me or come see me in office hours.
~Jacob
Posted on

Meeting 10/30

Senior Design Students,

Thanks to all who attended yesterday evening’s meeting! The next one is scheduled for next Wednesday 11/7 at 6:00 pm, location TBD.
For those who couldn’t attend the last meeting, we made some headway on building our knowledge-base on the website and setting up portfolio pages. For those of you interested in this CoP, please do the following:
  • Make a page on the ESCoP website and title it with your name (message me if you don’t have a profile). Please change the parent page to ‘members’
  • Add a little information about yourself, your skills, and a resume/cover letter to the page. This is your portfolio/profile page.
  • Visit our Slack.
Posted on

Welcome!

Welcome to the Embedded Systems Community of Practice site!

I’m Jacob Dawes, coordinator for this community. Here you can find other engineers/students working with embedded systems and exchange tips, tutorials, and expertise. I hope we can share some of the projects we have worked on the past as well, particularly if they involve some embedded systems!

The site contains three pages that are essentially live documents:

  • Members – a list of active/participating members in the community
  • Tutorials – a list of topical tutorials relating to embedded systems
  • Cool Boards/Chips – a list of embedded systems (from chip level to board level) with device families organized roughly from high to low level

Please bear with me while these become more fully populated.

A little bit about my background:

I graduated in 2017 with a BS in ECE. Since then, I’ve been working on my MS (also in ECE) in order to delve further into my field and explore advanced/interdisciplinary topics such as lab-on-chip, integrated sensors, and microfluidics. I’ve worked on many projects with an embedded component, which is why am excited to be involved with this community!