I had an idea for a concept wheelchair using a holonomic base and a differential locking gear system that runs only on two motors. I’m not sure if this idea has been explored before but I thought it would be fun to take out my 3Ds Max and whip up a little model of how such a chair would look like.
Monthly Archives: August 2014
Microcontroller Mapper
This is little project that I worked on for a while. Imagine something like processor expert, but for Texas Instruments MSP430 (or most any family of microcontrollers). Its a GUI that allows you to quickly assemble a board definitions include file for use in your project with great ease, and writing the least amount of code by hand (which can be error prone if the project is quite large). I developed this tool after working on a projects that had to be ported to work from one microcontroller to lots of others. Instead of going around writing hundreds of lines of register #defines, I made a program that allows you to quickly assign pins and modules in microcontrollers, while simultaneously verifying that you did not map a pin twice in different functions.
Concept
The mapping of the microcontroller is divided into three layers. Modules, Resources and Mapping.
- Modules are generic macro definitions that descrive microcontroller peripherals. These are generic, and can be reused as many times as copies of the hardware exist inside the microncontroller. For example a DIGITAL_PIN, or a UART.
- Resources are lists of modules that are given specific locations in a microcontroller. For example, P1.1 and P1.2 as a DIGITAL_PIN.
- Mapping involves connecting the users project to specific resources in a microcontroller. This translates to giving the resource macro a user friendly name in the location specified by the resource. For example, BUTTON1 in P1.1 (which will automatically get set as a DIGITAL_PIN).
Hello world
After having fiddled with my own website for some time, and having collections of projects in different places, I decided hereafter to start posting my projects in this blog. As much as I have liked the simplicity of Blogger, I can never feel that I get the right touch to the posts. And since I would like to share tutorials and repositories in the future, I think that wordpress gives the right flavour needed for these things. As a little history, I am an Electronics Engineer that loves to fiddle with microcontroller technologies, ASIC design, algorithms, math and Japanese pop culture. I hope you’ll enjoy reading through my posts as much as I will enjoy writing down these posts as a form of long term archive.