The LPC2148 header board was bought from Rhydo Labz. You cannot directly power up and start to use. It lacks communication interface. To flash the controller, you need a serial port or a JTAG port. Since this board doesn’t have these port connectors, you need to solder them. So it might be hard for a newbie.
Instead of this board, you can try the BlueBoard which has all the port connectors. I will recommend this for a newbie. I hope that board is worth for its price.
The next thing which you need is a power supply to power the board. You can build your own power supply (If someone needs to know how to build a power supply, I will write a tutorial. But please put a comment in this post saying that you need the tutorial.) ,or you can buy 5V DC power supply (adapters).
Once the board is powered up, it can start to execute your code in its memory. But a fresh controller wont be having any code in its memory to execute. You need a programmer to load the code into its memory. But the LPC series controllers have built-in serial boot-loaders. These boot-loaders can get the code from the serial port and write into its flash memory. So you don’t need a programmer.
To program the controller using the serial boot-loader, you just need to connect the controller to the host PC and the host PC needs to run a serial programmer software. You can get a lot of serial programmer software for LPC controllers. Some of them are
So thats all. Power up the board and connect the serial port to the controller. Run the serial programmer software in the PC. You controller will execute the code flashed into its memory.
But wait. From where you can get the hex file to flash into its memory? Its simple. You just need a cross-compiler. To the cross-compiler, you just need to feed your C source file. It will compile and give you *.out files, which later can be converted into *.hex files.
I will soon try to post a wiki page about how to compile and flash the code into the memory.
This time I am with an AVR USB board. It is an tiny development board for the AT90USB162 chips. I have actually made this board design for my friend’s main project. The design has been made using gEDA. It’s an complete open hardware project. But still the schematics are missing.
Actually I have started drawing the board layout using pcb directly instead of using gsch2pcb. I will try to upload the schematic of the board soon as possible.
Special thanks to Sreeraj and Pramode Sir. This project was completed 3 months before. But I didn’t have much time for blogging. Sorry for the late post.
This page is a wiki. If you find any missing portions, please edit the wiki if you can… Every content, even the circuit diagram is drawn using FREE SOFTWARE
After a single day work of writing this tutorial, I just googled about my tutorial. The funniest thing I found was that a tutorial similar to mine is in The Linux Documentation Project. One day work full of waste ! I could have just googled it before writting this tutorial… Also he is a student of Pramode Sir.
This is just a small description about the Embedded Design With GNU/Linux seminar that I had attended. Its not a complete report !
Free Software Cell, Government Engineering College, Barton Hill, Thiruvananthapuram had Organised a One Day National Seminar on “Embedded Design With GNU/Linux” On March 21, 2009, Saturday at the College Auditorium in association with Visiting Faculty Scheme, Directorate of Technical Education , Govt. of Kerala and Kerala State Council for Science Technology and Environment.
I was there to attend the event. I and Sreeraj reached the Trivandrum railway station at 3.oo AM. We waited Pramode Sir for his arrival. After refreshing we had a breakfast. Almost at 9.15 Am we reached the college.
The inauguration was almost at 9.30 AM. There was welcome speech from students and also from the Principal of the college.
At 10 AM we had the Keynote Address ‘Free Software for Science and Technology’ by Dr. V.Sasikumar . It was a nice session about Free Software, its importance and also a short introduction on Creative Commons. It was ended at 10.30 AM.
Next session was by Mr. Shakthi Kannan on ‘Badam Halwa of Embedded Systems’. It was a nice session and was interactive. He gave a very good description about the important topics in Embedded Systems.
There was one more session by Shakthi on ‘Electronics Design Automation Using GNU/Linux’. It was mainly about the Free Software EDA tools. He showed some electronics designs which was done using Free Software.
After the first session by Shakthi, I had shown him one of my GNUdino board design which was done using Free Software. In the middle of the second session Shakthi invited me to the stage to give a small description about the GNUdino board design. I gave a small description to the audience about GNUdino board and also ARDUINO. This session was ended at 1.00 PM.
The afternoon session was ‘How to Hack an ARM Microcontroller Using GNU/Linux’ by Pramode Sir. He showed the some of his STM32 Primer experiments which is documented here. It was also a nice session. Pramode Sir was afraid whether all will be sleeping because it was such a topic and also because everyone will be in a good sleepy mood after having a good Biriyani. But he showed his skills by giving sticker who answered his questions. All we eagerly listening his talk. There were also some question about the compilation.
The second afternoon session was ‘Java In Action- With Lego MindStorm NXT – Robot’ by Mr. David John. This session was about programming the Lego MindStorm NXT – Robot. It was also a nice and interactive session. At the end he showed a line following robot using Lego MindStorm NXT – Robot .
All the session had an end at 4.30 PM. There was award distribution to the speakers. Also participation certificate to the students who attended the talk.We left from Trivandrum at 11 PM.
It is nice if there is more such talks conducted. Anyway thanks to Free Software Cell, Govt. Engg. College, Thiruvananthapuram..
