Monday, March 02, 2015

Arduino programs ARM

OK - so for the last couple of days I have been waxing lyrical about a new extension to the Arduino IDE which allows it to program the STM32F1xx range of Cortex M3 microcontrollers.

This afternoon, I built up one of my ARMiGo boards with a STM32F103 ad managed to program it with Blinky - entirely from Arduino 1.60 - augmented with Roger Clark's Arduino_STM32.

Quick Start Guide.

1. Download the latest stable Arduino IDE from here.
2. Download the Arduino_STM32 from Github - here
3. Unzip the folder and place in the Hardware folder of Arduino 1.60
4. Make sure you have dwnloaded any drivers - eg ST-Link you might need for board programming.
5. Restart Arduino so that the changes in the Hardware folder are incorporated

When you select the tools menu, you will find that a load of new board options are available at the bottom of the board list:



Now I am using a ST Link programmer (off  STM F103RB Nucleo board) - so I chose the last option STM Nucleo F103RB (STLink)


Sunday, March 01, 2015

Ideas into Action



Last year, I backed a good friend's Kickstarter, for the Mirobot - a small open source, WiFi controlled turtle-like robot to help teach kids to code. It was well received, and well over-funded, and hopefully will be the start of a range of educational technology kits.

During the development of Mirobot, it became clear that a traditional through-hole pcb design, incorporating a DIL-socketed ATmega328, was not the way to go - especially when you could buy a complete Arduino Pro Mini, from China, for less than the cost of the microcontroller over here.

It also became apparent that there were a lot of interesting WiFi and BLE modules - available from China, at very low cost, that really meant that designing your own, was a non-starter. Devices such as the ESP8266 and the HM11 BLE module - that were now made accessible due to an easy to use serial command interface.  Developments such as these are changing the way in which we put hardware together. We buy a bunch of well engineered building blocks, and we stick them together like LEGO.
And just like LEGO - these building blocks are becoming more sophisticated (but cheaper) year on year.

The great thing about LEGO is it's simple User Interface.  Those studs and holes make it so easy to put pieces together - that even a toddler quickly masters the skills required. Well perhaps digital hardware is becoming much like this - but with the one advantage, that those studs and holes can be manipulated in software code to make things fit, in entirely new ways. It's like having an endless supply of Sugru, or 3D printer - from which to mould or print your own LEGO creations.

LEGO can also be used to convey somewhat abstract concepts in computing.  The "one by one" block is the LEGO equivalent of the bit, and by putting these together we can make more interesting blocks - such as the "four by two" or the "eight by one". I'm going to end the analogy here - before I get distracted thinking about teaching binary maths and logical operations in LEGO - that's for another time.

Building Blocks

Every modern digital product is based around a microcontroler, one or more communications interfaces and a power supply.  Indeed, solving how you get the power in and the data out remains one of the most creative challenges to the digital product designer.

So for any product, you have the following common blocks

Microcontroller block
Communications block
Power Supply block

Look at any product - say the Arduino Duemillenove or Uno, and you can clearly identify these parts on the board.  In the case of the Duemillenove, the parts are quite separate, there's the ATmega328, the FTDI chip, and the 5V regulator. The rest is just a few connectors - so that the whole lot plugs together in a useful way.

For those familiar with Arduino - they have learned the functionality of each pin, they know it's limitations, and they know where to find (or write) the code to make that pin work in the desired manner. Learning the capabilities of a 28 pin microcontroller, has been simplified by the Arduino ecosystem - but can easily be extended to highlight the capabilities of microcontrollers with 100 pins or more.

The combination of a hardware abstraction layer - which removes the need to understand, at a register level, the internal structure of the processor, plus a couple of layers of firmware abstraction which lifts the coder well above the machine language of the mcu - mean that the user can rapidly make progress with new creative ideas - without getting bogged down in the intricacies of the microcontroller architecture or machine language. This is what I like about Arduino, and why I think it has made microcontrollers  much more accessible to a whole new generation of programmers.

However, the 8-bit Arduinos have their limitations, and the IDE has been widely criticised - but as with all old friends, you learn to forgive their shortcomings and foibles.

Improving Arduino

For many newcomers, Arduino will be their first introduction to physical computing devices and compiled C and C++ code.  There is nothing fundamentally wrong with Arduino code - it's just a tool to get a job done.  The current IDE does not encourage good programming practice, splitting the task into multiple firmware modules, nor does it allow the user a means to debug or single step the code to identify where problems lie.

It does however have a huge user base, a massive community following and a vast resource of libraries. These are its strong points.

Recent developments have ported the Arduino "language" to a wider range of microcontrollers - including ARM chips from Atmel (Due), Freescale (Teensy) and STMicroelectronics (Maple). Additionally the Arduino language has been ported to FPGAs - such as the Xilinx Spartan 6 - on the Papilio Duo board - where it runs of a 100MHz soft-core - the ZPUino.

These are all great developments, and keeping the Arduino philosophy current and branching out into a wider range of hardware targets. We will perhaps reach the point, where chip suppliers offer their own versions of the Arduino language reference - so that digitalWrite() works on any microcontroller you happen to wish to use.






State of the Nation

"Procrastination got me to where I am today...."

There has never been a better time for the technically creative hobbyist. New devices are appearing almost daily and prices are constantly being eroded.  This is good news for the enthusiast, but bad news for the people who want to make a living out of selling hardware.  This became ever so apparent when I spotted yesterday that my local PC World were selling Raspberry Pi's for just £19.99.

Yes - I realise that they have just dropped the price of the Model B+, and A+, now that  Model 2 is available, but I never thought I'd see a big box retailer stock the Raspberry Pi, this side of hell freezing over. Perhaps I should get out more. More worryingly, is that I think I paid about £20 for my first Arduino (a Chinese Freeduino copy), and even more disturbing is that if you buy the official Uno R3 from the online store - it will still cost you 20 Euros.  But then, no-one is daft enough to buy the official ones, from the official store - are they?

So hardware prices are tumbling, and this is bad news for people that run online hardware shops, trying to maintain a living, when customers just trawl Ebay or TaoBao for the cheapest. It's an exact parallel to what is happening in the High Street - and why we are struggling to remain a nation of shopkeepers, let alone a world leading industrial manufacturing powerhouse. Those days are over.

So in order to remain afloat in the hardware business, you have to keep inventing the next great thing, or have something so unique about your product, that everyone flocks to it - religiously, and you can afford to keep your margins ridiculously high.

So that's where we are at right now.  Great for tech consumers, not so great for UK GDP.




Pushing Arduino Further

Every programmer desires to surround themself with a familiar programming environment which allows smooth and efficient code development, without having to constantly struggle with the foibles of the tool chain.

About 15 months ago, when I first got started with the STM32 series of ARM microcontrollers, I found the CooCox CoIDE - a free/open IDE based on Eclipse and GCC. Within about a week, I had mastered the complexities of the STM32 peripherals sufficiently enough to allow me to blink a LED and print characters to a terminal. It was hard work, dealing with an unfamiliar environment, but once over the initial hurdles, my rate of progress increased significantly.

During that time, I thought that it would be a whole lot easier if these newer microcontrollers could be programmed within the familiar Arduino environment - and shortly I found the Leaf Labs Maple board, with their version of Arduino which ran on an STM32F103. Unfortunately they had abandoned developing this product further for Windows, which was a disappointment, for us mortals that have yet to discover the joys of Linux.

Last summer, I had a student intern join our company, and I quickly had him up to speed developing a product on the ATmega328 and coding using the Arduino IDE.  By September, he had sufficient experience of Arduino, that we progressed onto mbed so that he might develop a product based on the STM32F103.

The beauty of mbed is that it allows rapid progress, and when used with the very low cost STM Nucleo boards, within a few days we had a working prototype of a current and temperature monitoring system for a dc motor drive.

However, neither CooCox or mbed really have a Cinderella fit into the "Arduino Slipper", so it was to my delight that I learned about Bob Cousins and Roger Clark's work on Arduino_STM32.

Roger's Wiki describes the Arduino_STM32 project thus:

Arduino STM32 adds the ability to develop for STM32F103 based boards, including the Maple and Maple mini using the Arduino 1.6 IDE
There is also experimental support for STM32F3 and STM32F4, however code for both of these devices is in early stages of development / porting, and only the STM32F1 is close to full support for the Arduino 1.0 API (and mostly compliant with the Arduino 1.6.x API).
With Arduino_STM32, you now have the familiar Arduino development environment, but for a faster, more capable 32bit processor, which is available in a wide range of standard packages, with a choice of peripherals and on-chip resources to suit the application and budget.
I realise that Arduino have long since moved into 32bit ARM territory with their Due board - but do I really want to base my designs around a processor that costs £8.33 in 1 off.  Admittedly - as with all Arduino products, there are plenty of Chinese rip-offs of the Due board - starting at £8.00.
I really think that Arduino have backed the wrong horse with their Atmel ARM M3 offering, and will be losing out to STM32 based development boards such as STM's own Discovery Boards, and their Nucleo series of boards that work within the mbed environment.
It is however encouraging to see that talented code developers are pushing the envelope of Arduino, and making it available to a wider range of microcontrollers.
If you want a no-thrills, very low cost, breadboard friendly dev board for your next project - consider the likes of these STM32F103 based boards from China - yours for a couple of pounds.