Setup OLIMEXINO-STM32 to work with Arduino IDE

Arduino IDE support Cortex-M ARM architecture and although STM32 is not “officially” included stm32duino.com has all the resources to add support for STM32 boards in Arduino.

This forum post explains what should be done step by step to setup and use OLIMEXINO-STM32 board with Arduino IDE.

Programming ESP8266-EVB with microPython tutorial

Our Belgium distributor MCHobby made nice tutorial about how to program ESP8266-EVB board with microPython.

The tutorial is available also in French.

Nice tutorial for writing and debugging plain C on ARM Cortex-M3 STM32F103

Jacob Mossberg wrote nice tutorial how to program in C ARM Cortex-M3 with GCC and how to debug it with GDB and OpenOCD.

We like very much the hardware he is using 🙂 STM32-H103 and ARM-USB-OCD-H.

 

A20-OLinuXino-MICRO project – How to set up a raid 1 filesystem

Flayol Frédéric submitted on our project page link to his interesting project, he setup Raid 1 file system with two USB Flash drives.

There are also many other interesting projects on his blog!

Do button for IFTTT with ESP8266-EVB now you have endless opportunities to make receipts with the IFTTT tools

IFTTT is a web platform that facilitates connections between other big platforms under the form of recipes giving a great degree of flexibility in creating mashups. You can interact with almost  every social platform on the web like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. For this purpose you make receipts like: If I get e-mail with picture on my Gmail account store the picture in my Dropbox and share it on Twitter, or etc.

Just a few days ago IFTTT launched a channel for makers.This was a highly awaited feature since until now it was impossible to connect prototypes to the recipes and only a few approved devices were available from large producers that were accepted in the platform. The Maker channel changes all that. It allows both making web requests to the channel to send events to other platforms from devices and from other platforms to the devices.

Constantin Craciun almost immediately add “DO” button with ESP8266-EVB and here is his tutorial.

You can see on this video how he uses ESP8266 to switch ON and OFF lamp via his phone:

Now you can think of endless apps for this DO button, like sending SMS “I’m home” to parents phones when the kid arrive from school and press the button.

Or button at the reception desk of hotel which send message to taxi company “go to hotel xxx to pickup customer”, etc. etc.

We are working on the small cloud broker for our ESP8266 IoT Firmware, and this IFTTT API will be definitely among the first implemented!

ESP8266-EVB support for JTAG development with flash load, breakpoints, disassembly, step debugging in Visual Studio C/C++

Ivan Shcherbakov @SysProgs shared interesting article. He wrote support for ESP8266-EVB to VisualGDB Visual Studio plugin for embedded software development in C/C++.

With this plugin you can use JTAG to debug code in ESP8266, also to set breakpoints, view the disassembled code etc. This adds new level for professional developing using ESP8266.

MOD-LCD3310 OSHW monochrome LCD 84×48 pixels board with UEXT connector

MOD-LCD3310 is Open Source Hardware board released under Apache 2.0 Licensee.
It’s low cost 84×48 pixels LCD which can connect to any of our development boards with UEXT connectors.
The schematic in PDF format and Board and Schematic files in Eagle CAD format are on GitHub.

Examples how to connect MOD-LCD3310 to OLIMEXINO-32U4 (Arduino Leonardo), OLIMEXINO-STM32 (Maple), PIC32-PINGUINO (Pinguino), A20-OLinuXino-MICRO, LPC-P1227 (NXP) and STM32-P103 (ST) are on GitHub.

The LCD panel alone is also available for purchase on our web shop

backlight panel

and the matching connector

which you can use to make your own PCBs with this display for your next project.

Experimenting with Gas Sensors and Arduino

We have 4 different Gas Sensors on our web shop: MQ-2, MQ-3, MQ-7 and MQ-135.

All they work on same principle: sensor element is heated and it’s conductivity change with the gas concentration.

The heater require 5V and have 31 ohm resistance, so your power supply should provide 200mA of current for the sensor.

Sensor have both analog and digital output, the analog output is 0-5V, the digital output is frequency related to the output value.

MQ-2 is sensor of LPG, Propane, Methane and Hydrogen gas and can be used for domestic gas leak alarms
MQ-3 is sensor of Alcohol and Benzine and can be used for breath analizer
MQ-7 is sensor of Carbon monoxide CO and can be used for car gases analizer
MQ-135 is sensor of NH3, NOx, Alcohol, Benzine, Smoke, CO2 and can be used for quality of air analizer

We did some experiments today with all four sensors connecting them to OLIMEXINO-32U4 (Arduino Leonardo compatible).

The sensors have 4 pins: AO – Analog Output, DO – Digital output, GND, VCC-5V

OLIMEXINO-32U4 should be switched to work on 5V.

Three wires are used: AO from sensor to A0 of Arduino, VCC from sensor to 5V, GND from sensor to GND of Arduino.

The sketch is simple:

int sensorPin = A0;
int sensorValue = 0;

void setup() {
 Serial.begin(9600);
 pinMode(sensorPin, INPUT);
}

void loop() {
 sensorValue = analogRead(sensorPin);
 Serial.println(sensorValue);
}

It reads the sensor value and print it on Serial terminal.

Note that when sensor are power up they need about 1 minute to settle, in this time the heater heats up the sensor.

We experimented with Isopropile alcohol, Benzine, Lighter Gas, human breath of two different persons 🙂

Here is the measured data:

MQ-2 normal air output  100
     Isopropile alcohol 540
     Ligther Gas        760
     Benzine            450
     Breath1            150
     Breath2            140

MQ-3 normal air output 180
     Isopropile alcohol 800
     Lighter Gas        400
     Benzine            700
     Breath1            220
     Breath2            270
 
MQ-7 normal air output  150
     Isopropile alcohol 750
     Lighter Gas        900
     Benzine            800
     Breath1            170
     Breath2            160

MQ-135 normal air output 130
      Isopropile alcohol 700
      Lighter Gas        760
      Benzine            450
      Breath1            150
      Breath2            140

the results are:

MQ-2 shows good sensibility to Lighter Gas

MQ-3 detects well Isopropile alcohol and Benzine

MQ-7 detects well Isopropile alcohol, Lighter gas and Benzine

MQ-135 detects well Isopropile alcohol, Lighter gas

Building Debian Linux image for A20-OLinuXino-LIME2 with mainline kernel 3.19 new tutorial by Remy van Elst

 

A20 is now in mainline which means you can build mainline kernel and it will work on A20-OLinuxino-LIME2.

Remy made blog post how to build Debian Linux with latest Kernel 3.19 from scratch – you can read how he did this here.

New Project: Using A20-OLinuXino-MICRO as framegrabber with easyCap

Armando Basile submitted interesting project with A20-OLinuXino-MICRO to our Project section. He is using A20-OLinuXino-MICRO and easyCap framegrabber together to capture pictures.

You can see his project in action on the video below: