Martin Cowen ⁽⁴⁶⁾

Excel is a great all purpose tool, used by maybe 7% of the world's population. From shopping lists to budgets, Gantt charts and calendars to circuit simulators and digital music workstations, it can do it all. It is so good at so many things and so universally available to businesses that in many cases the biggest competition for software startups is not other specialized software solving the same problems but Excel. When it comes to using Excel for engineering tasks, there are lots of known pitfalls. Treating values as dates, or strings which are supposed to be hex like "51E67" as scientific format is one big category of pitfalls. Another is that although the probability of an error in any one cell is small, when you have a high number of cells all dependent on each other, the probability of…

I've been building up this set of equipment on my bench at home over the last few months, with some older kit reused. It's the minimum needed to do embedded development and I don't even have a bench power supply yet. I can get away without one since the dev kits are USB powered, but when I need one I have my eye on the Gophert NPS-1601 From top left to bottom right 1280 x 1024 @ 60 Hz VGA and DVI inputs, USB hub with 2 downstream USB-A. Was £360 in 2003. 13" 1920 x 1080 @ 60 Hz matte non-touch display Intel i5-5200 CPU @ 2.20GHz (Broadwell-U, 14nm, 2 cores, 4 threads) 8 GB DDR3 RAM, 256 GB SSD Liteon L8H-256V2G-11M.2 Intel HD Graphics 5500 Windows 10 Home USB3 Type A x2, Mini Display Port, 3.5mm phones/mic, SD…

Having got the BLE Lightbulb peripheral example working as I wanted it to on the nRF52 development kit (PCA10040), the next step was to get my other dev kit to be the controller for it, in place of the smartphone app. NovelBits helpfully provides all the code for this on the page How to build the simplest nRF52 BLE Central (Lightbulb use case) but it is targeted at the nRF52840 and SDK 15. I only had one nRF52 dev kit and one nRF51 dev kit. As I learned previously, the nRF51 is only supported by SDK version 12, so I had the job of porting the example code down from SDK version 15 and changing it over to the smaller, M0 based chip. At the same time, the Softdevice (BTLE stack) changes from s132 to s130. My plan was to…

SES Include File Manager A simple helper application for use with Segger Embedded Studio when working with the Nordic Semiconductor SDK. The application checks which paths exist and allows you to remove those that don’t, allows a search by filename to show which folder they are in, and allows conversion between relative and absolute paths for the include folders. (It does not search your SDK folder for include files to automatically add them to the include paths.) The Nordic SDK folder is structured so that many include files which are needed for a project are in different folders. All of the folder paths need to be added to the c_user_include_directories definition for the project to compile. It is time consuming to search for each include file that a compile will complain about being missing so that it’s path can be…

Segger Embedded Studio project files appear to be XML formatted with a custom DOCTYPE. <!DOCTYPE CrossStudio_Project_File> <solution Name="ble_app_MA_lightbulb_pca10040_s132" target="8" version="2"> <project Name="ble_app_MA_lightbulb_pca10040_s132"> <configuration Name="Common" arm_architecture="v7EM" arm_core_type="Cortex-M4" arm_endian="Little" arm_fp_abi="Hard" arm_fpu_type="FPv4-SP-D16" arm_linker_heap_size="8192" arm_linker_process_stack_size="0" arm_linker_stack_size="8192" arm_linker_treat_warnings_as_errors="No" ... /> <configuration Name="Debug" c_preprocessor_definitions="DEBUG; DEBUG_NRF" gcc_optimization_level="None" /> </solution> Reading In VB.NET, Private xmlDoc As XmlDocument = New XmlDocument() xmlDoc.PreserveWhitespace = True xmlDoc.XmlResolver = Nothing xmlDoc.Load(filename) Once the XML is loaded, an attribute such as c_user_include_directories can be read using this syntax sIncludes = xmlDoc.SelectSingleNode("solution/project/configuration[@c_user_include_directories]").Attributes("c_user_include_directories").Value Writing However, writing out an this XML document object back to a file has a few problems. The DOCTYPE tag changes in that additional square brackets [] appear at the end due to a bug in the .NET framework, so you get <!DOCTYPE CrossStudio_Project_File []> which although is valid XML, causes SES to say that the file is not a valid project.