Embedded newbie

If you have used hifi's raspbian-ua-netinst, the unattended Raspbian installer , you might run into problems with modules: depmod -a ERROR: could not open directory /lib/modules/3.10-3-rpi: No such file or directory FATAL: could not search modules: No such file or directory I fixed this problem with: apt-get install git-core apt-get install rpi-update rpi-update reboot Note that this will also upgdare your firmware and the linux kernel!

I wanted to try out audio on the Raspberry Pi, using the Raspbian OS. Here's how I got it to work. The installer I used for Raspbian was the minimal network installer by hifi . This will use up only about 150MB of space and will not install a desktop, so you'll save a lot of resources with this approach. After installing Raspbian, this is what I needed to do in order to get sound output. First, login as root (default password = raspbian - change it ASAP!). Update the package list for APT , the package installer tool of Debian: apt-get update Install ALSA . apt-get install alsa-base At this point I discovered that the minimal installer doesn't include the sound card module of the raspi. Alsa's aplay is a  wav file player, and with it I could check which sound devices are available: aplay -L The output: null     Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture) ... and when trying to enable the sound card module, I got an error: ...

I got hold of the LPCXpresso development platform. This is a nice, thin 32-bit development platform with a built-in USB programmer for only 20€. The LPCXpresso. On the right is the target board, on the left is the LPC-Link USB JTAG debugger. An interesting design feature of the board is that the LPC-Link USB JTAG debugger portion of the board can be separated from the target and used separately to program NXP's other Cortex-M0, Cortex-M3 and ARM7/9 devices. The separated LPC-Link debugger. Picture: NXP There's three versions of the board. I got the one with the LPC1114 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller. They've also made boards with the LPC1343 and the LPC1769 Cortex-M3 controllers. Check the embedded artists homepage for more info about these . This article focuses on the LPC1114 version. The target portion of the chip features the LPC1114, a 12 MHz crystal and some limited prototyping space. The LPC-Link portion of the board has a LPC3154 for the debu...

How to program the STM32VLDISCOVERY board ? ST does not provide a toolchain themselves, instead there are three different officially supported toolchains available, for which ST has provided simple tutorials. All of the three official toolchains are for Windows, so Linux users have to think of something else. Fortunately, multiple options exist for also Linux users. Here's an overview of all the tools I'm aware of. First off, I'll explain the easy, official options. These are unfortunately only for Windows users. Officially promoted toolchains ST provides example code and documentation for three toolchains: Atollic TrueSTUDIO, IAR Embedded Workbench and Keil MDK-ARM. Download ST's example firmware package here User manual for the firmware package Below are some quick facts & links about the official toolchains. Atollic TrueSTUDIO (Windows) This is an Eclipse -based development platform that includes an optimizing C/C++ compiler, editor and a de...