Prusa has introduced a new firmware version for their line of 3D printers. One of the cool new features is the capability to control the display's backlight intensity from the settings menu. There is a big chance that this option will not work if your 3D printer was produced early 2019 or before. The reason is
Real-time operating systems (RTOS) allows us to develop complex embedded systems. By using self-contained tasks (threads) each with their own context we can implement programs with multitasking behavior using a single CPU. Passing information between these tasks (inter-task communication) is an important aspect when designing an embedded application using an RTOS. We can say that
The peripheral access layer is a layer of the firmware that provides access to the registers of a microcontroller's peripheral units. It has to be easy to use, well structured, and efficient. This layer is part of the software packages every microcontroller vendor provides for free with their Software Development Kits (SDK) and Integrated Development
Direct Memory Access (DMA) is a process of transferring data from one memory location to another without the direct involvement of the processor (CPU). The main benefit of using DMA is more efficient data movement in the embedded system. Principle of Operation There are many different types of DMA implementations, some of them for very
Designing an embedded system that employs a real-time operating system (RTOS) with multitasking behavior means that there will be resources that must be shared between the tasks. These shared resources (e.g peripheral modules, data structures, communication interfaces, etc.) by their nature do not support multiple concurrent accesses. Accessing them without any rules in place may
This article is a natural extension on the topics we covered in Function Calls on ARM Cortex-M Microprocessors. Due to the hardware specifics of the Cortex-M architecture, there is actually a lot of common in how function calls and exceptions are handled. The good thing for us as developers is that all exception handlers can
Here is the bootloader code, let's go through it and explain it step by step: /* Includes ------------------------------------------------------------------*/ #include "main.h" #include "flash.h" #include "srecord.h" #define USER_APPLICATION_BASE_ADDRESS 0x8004000U uint8_t srec_data[16]; void __svc(1) EnablePrivilegedMode(void ); void __SVC_1 (void){ __disable_irq(); __set_CONTROL((__get_CONTROL( ))& 0xFFFFFFFE); // enter priv mode __enable_irq(); } static void BootJump(uint32_t *Address) { /* 1. Make sure,
For one of my tests, I needed a communication using a serial port. I decided to use an Arduino board and the reason behind that is simple - you need to add only 3 lines of code to the default Arduino sketch to create a serial communication between the board and another serial device (most
In our article covering the scheduling algorithms of real-time operating systems (RTOS), we stated that they can run tasks in such a way that leaves the impression of a multitasking behavior. This is achieved by giving the RTOS the capability to interrupt a currently executing task and to start executing another one. At some point
We already introduced the basic concepts of real-time operating systems (RTOS) and now we will take a deeper look into one of the most important things when designing an embedded system using an RTOS - the scheduling of the tasks and the algorithms that are used. Scheduling Process Scheduling is the process of deciding which
