/mdg/ - Microcontroller Development General

First thread about this with the intent of starting another general here within Sup Forums.

Making this to discuss personal projects with different microcontroller boards such as Arduino, BeagleBone, and Raspberry Pi.

What's a project that you've had in mind for these boards?
What are you working on?

//--Have any advice for the general? Let it be known--\\

Other urls found in this thread:

gearbest.com/development-boards/pp_211519.html?vip=155104
hackaday.com/2016/05/11/hackaday-prize-entry-powering-a-pi-from-a-battery/
bestvpn.com/blog/5919/how-to-hide-openvpn-traffic-an-introduction/
github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware
forum.kicad.info/t/cvpcb-error-loading-footprints/1747/10
youtube.com/watch?v=akD1O49JbqY
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

There's only one microcontroller in the picture.

>Rpi
>microcontroller
Pick one.

Also

P I C
I
C

OP here,
I'm new to microcontrollers, myself, and understand that the only microcontroller is the Arduino, but didn't know what would be a better suited name for the general.

What would these all classify as to better name the general?
Should we have a general strictly for microcontrollers like the Arduino devices and another for devices like the Raspberry pi?


Sorry for fucking up, I just want to start a centralized place for this type of discussion.

I have an arduino leo, but I think I broke it.

I keep reading that I should buy an in-circuit programmer with some tiny AVR chips, what's a good starter kit?

>I keep reading that I should buy an in-circuit programmer with some tiny AVR chips, what's a good starter kit?
Buy any of those 10$ chinese ones
AVR programming is pretty straightforward so there isn't much room for fucking up

Im currently waiting for my ESP8266 to arrive so that i can make a ridiculously small web server with an atmega32
Yes i know im a retard but why the fuck not?

Nice. I had an idea a while back to combine the use of an Arduino with a Raspberry pi so that I can make a somewhat portable device.

Do you know if there would be a way to power a Raspberry pi with the use of let's say... 18650 batteries?

That font dude, what is it? Shit that looks good!

You need a dc-dc boost converter

Yeah, there are tons of Chinese starter kits that would work just fine like said.

I'm thinking about getting this one, myself as a really simple starter pack:
gearbest.com/development-boards/pp_211519.html?vip=155104

Are basic microcontrollers like the Arduino capable of FFT and stuff like digital filtering or do I need something more advanced?

great.. another shitty general. When will reddit leave my board?
>What are you working on?
usb implementation using GPIO on atmega32

Its called monospace if remember correct

Funny, i saw a post about this on hackaday a few days ago
>hackaday.com/2016/05/11/hackaday-prize-entry-powering-a-pi-from-a-battery/

Nice
There's a firmware called V-USB if you're fine with a pre made solution, but i diy-ing is more fun

picture should be pic related

>BeagleBone, and Raspberry Pi.
>microcontroller
Brah what the FUCK are you doing?

See

>There's a firmware called V-USB if you're fine with a pre made solution, but i diy-ing is more fun
Yes. I know about that, I thought I'd go for my own solution because v-usb source was nearly unreadable. turns out there is no way do it without spawning a spaghetti king. It's too late to stop now though.

Single board computer might be a better name for it, since RPi/etc/Arduino are technically "computers."

You can program the ESP directly from the Arduino enviroment and it is actually faster and have more memory than ATMEGA328 type arduinos. ESPs have like 10 pins you can use for digital shit.

>>>OP here

Thats news to me, i thought i had to use a separate micro controller to drive the ESP via UART

Why don't you faggots buy/create an ISP programmer and a bread board so you can use any microcontroller you want?
Are you this much afraid of connecting some wires together that you need to buy shit like arduino?

an atmega32 is like $2 each

Don't you still need a programmer?

Not really, you could use this simple circuit to program via the serial port, it is possible
Programmers are just way more convenient though

Fuck off we don't need more shitty generals

This is probably the least shitty general on this board

I don't know shit about resistors tho.
I don't even know what those symbols mean.

>the intent of starting another general here within Sup Forums.

All generals need to die.

You can program almost all avr chips directly with your computer if you have a parallel/com port.
Which you must have if you are serious about embedded programming anyway. USB programmers require a chip to talk usb protocol, So you already need to have a programmer to create those.
Or you can just buy a ready made universal programmer.
pic related is what I used to use before I gave in for usbasp for ~$10

The least smelly pile of shit doesn't mean it's worth smelling.

Generals are cancer and the hallmark of the death of once-interesting boards. With generals come tripfags, and with tripfags come off-topic attention whoring, and so on.

I'm going to make an old terminal keyboard work on USB, probably using an ATmega32u4. I have not found many things for that specific keyboard (cherry g80 9009) but hey, I hope to be able to make at least the 105 keys work.

I bought a raspberry pi 3, I installed windows 10 iot on it and now I gave no idea what to use it for

can anyone give advice for how to incorporate a voltage regulator into a circuit? i want to draw about 900mA via USB onto my device, allocate some to an MSP430 and the rest to other active components on the board. i don't know much about this stuff so any help is appreciated

Programmers best friend.

Arduino clone from China costs few cents more than atmega by itself.

You can't draw 900mA from USB retard. Unless it's USB3 and you told the USB driver, through the data lanes, that you wanted an USB3 communication. So, not happening.

500mA MAX. So use an outside power source.
Also, the USB power lane is already regulated to 5V, no need to furthyer regulate it if you only need 5V.

If you need 3.3V, use one of the tenty millions of 3.3V regulators on the market, 5V at the input, ground pin to ground and the output to your electronics of choice.

i meant usb3.0. thanks for your reponse

Focus on FPGA for intensive parallel calculations.

Hardware Development General ?

This way you can have, microcontrollers, Single Board Computers, FPGA and ASIC everything in the same place.

i agree with that, there's not a lot of DIY hardware here beyond PC builds

Hardware Design General sounds better

Anyway this thread is probably going into the trash.

I just made a bunch of lights blink on an arduino.

kinda boring desu

I can get behind a hardware general, sadly there are too many autists on this board.
>rip

> Microcontroller

Call it SoC general or oneboard general

don't get discouraged, just post high q stuff

No cheap mcu will be good for realtime digital filtering. Those have no FPU, and just a single data bus/memory.
For FFT and digital filtering a DSP may be more viable than any 8 bit MCU

Could someone clarify the difference between a microcontroller and FPGA please?

From what I understand, an FPGA is basically a microcontroller that hasn't had it's logic gates arranged/programmed yet.

MCU: the underlying logical architecture doesn't change, and any software you write has to use the same architecture, which might not be efficient if your problem changes, but isn't a problem if you don't have special performance requirements
FPGA: the logic architecture is configurable, to create circuits that perform a certain task more efficiently than a general purpose microcontroller. Software Defined Radio, parallel computing, video processing are applications that can benefit from FPGA

MCUs programs are executed sequentially.
Once you arrange the gates in a FPGA, any function it may perform is done in paralel.
Both may have prebuild peripherical units, such as communication, timers, ADCs, DACs, GPIOs and so on.

best way to kill something good/cool on Sup Forums is to make a /tla/ general about it
way to go
fuck you and fuck this

Because that stopped those fucking watchcancer threads from popping up.

Finally received the first prototype of a project based on the Atmel ATSAM4S2B all soldered up and ready. Will test tomorrow, can't wait to see if it actually works or not

Just name it embedded board/development general or something to keep the trolling down.

>can't wait to see if it actually works or not
You should know beforehand because you calculated, simulated and designed the thing, right?
Jokes aside, nice board. What is your project about?

Rolling for embedded general

they're only cancer because they made them a general
thank you for proving my point

>they're only cancer because they made them a general
Those watch threads were cancer because they're motherfucking watch threads. How the fuck is a watch technology, especially the mechanical ones that the retards keep posting?

what goes in the empty spot with the arrow ??

you are of course completely right, they are retarded and belong on /fa/ or something
but a similar pattern befalls anything made into a general and will too happen to these if you do this
i beg of you not to

I don't browse generals much, but is it mostly because of a couple cancerfaggots who keep trip/namefagging every thread?

many years ago, Sup Forums use to almost be good
you could come hear and learn/talk about interesting random shit
now it's just Sup Forumstards spewing mayms
generals destroy novelty and discussion, everything is just redirected to the relevant general - in which you can of course do/learn nothing because always just the same group of faggots circlejerking offtopic
there are of course a few exceptions to this, but generals and the idea that they are at all acceptable have basically destroyed yotsuba
i blame redditors who are to dumb to realize that they are not wanted here and refuse to just stay on theirown sites - unfortunately for me, these undesirables are prolly the majority here now

AVR>PIC

Nice thread OP.

I am thinking of using my raspberry pi's as a VPN (for privacy) and leaving them hidden in buildings which have a fast internet connection. One of the main issues I expect to happen is OpenVPN requires certain ports to be opened, and I cannot open them myself, nor can I rely on UPNP.

might as well ask here

where can I learn about making generic drivers like for chinkshit game controllers are the like?


I know C/C++ but have no idea where to begin.

how would you connect to them? looks like it works on port 80, which wouldn't be blocked, but is better masked if forwarded to port 443
bestvpn.com/blog/5919/how-to-hide-openvpn-traffic-an-introduction/

Idk man, I'm still figuring it out myself, but the impression that I have gathered so far is that it is going to take alot of work to figure out

try to find existing examples of open source driver code for your application (make search queries specific to your MCU/platform); it might not be so easy, can you give an example of a controller you want to mod?

for you bb
This is the only open source thing i have done as of late, just an op amp with optional filters for something I'm prototyping

I want to get into embedded C dev, but I don't know what to make.

nice, what EDA software is that

do you like wireless networking? like I suggest to study the source of existing firmware and then think about it github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware

Altium, the only acceptable answer

how's the learning curve on that? My school just got a license for Altium but I don't know if I want to struggle to learn a whole new EDA, after just getting the hang of KiCad (which is a bit of a PITA to use correctly)

Shouldn't we, Sup Forumsentlemen, advocate the use of free eda software?

i'm all for free software but KiCad (one of the big free EDA projects) is experiencing some growing pains as it matures..one pain point is adding custom components and footprints to your project..IMO it should be as easy as open file 1, then open file 2, but no, you have to buy into their system of "library files", which is not so intuitive and harder to configure than it should be.. it's one of those situations where less would be more

Agreed. That's what came to mind at first.

once more the developers are aware of this problem but won't do anything forum.kicad.info/t/cvpcb-error-loading-footprints/1747/10

I know. I used it before the git library thing they are pulling now. Adding my own parts was pretty straightforward.
Some updates later (fresh install), I realize that default installation doesn't have ANY part. Like, how I'm suppossed to work without any parts at all?

>working on USB fan controller to actually use in my PC
>firmware 100% done, everything works
>SSD suddenly dies
>firmware gone
>I forgot to back it up
Back to implementing serial protocols

>looks like it works on port 80, which wouldn't be blocked, but is better masked if forwarded to port 443
He needs an inbound port if he wants it for a server. There's no way some random network is going to forward a port to some random device, especially not 80 or 443.

That works if you're a VPN client, then you can have a server on port 443 and pretend it's HTTP, but the server itself needs an open inbound port for OpenVPN.

>tfw used ATmega328 to switch 120VAC for my traffic lights
made the PCB, everything worked perfectly the first time i plugged it in. More of a hardware project than embedded though.

It's an industry standard so most people dont have much a choice when it comes to EDA software, but its really nice, tehres some youtube vids to get you going out there, the curve is there for sure but it's pretty easy to get the hang of once you know what you're doing.

The integration with other things like solidworks and the ease of plugin use is leagues ahead of anything else. I wouldn't recommend using anything else other than eagle if you're just starting out, and trying to learn.

Hello Seth

youtube.com/watch?v=akD1O49JbqY

Anyone have experience with this stuff?

nice one seth; now get that thing networked :)

completely new to all of this things. but i have some intrest.
quick question.
can i use a old camera from a smartphone with a RSP or something else?

also.
>links to where i can learn about microcontroller development

Your rant is less informative and productive than all of the aforementioned.

Shut the fuck up.

i am not sure about your camera question, but if it is possible it seems like it would require 1. identifying the camera component by way of the smart phone manufacturer's documentation or any labels on the board 2. using this to find the datasheet for the camera component 3. removing it with great care not to damage it (maybe difficult) 4. designing an interface between the camera and microcontroller based on the datasheet you found in step 2. Many data sheets provide a reference implementation that serves as an example that you can copy exactly to wire the interface to the MCU correctly. Then you have to program the thing..

For MCU development I'll recommend "Exploring BeagleBone: Tools and Techniques for Building with Embedded Linux" by Molloy..unfortunately it's BBB specific but teaches general concepts about embedded programming, linux, and communication interfaces, and some electronics.

I just bought an original Genuino Uno Starter Pack, but I noticed only 2-3-4-6-7-11-13 digital ports works. digitalWrite doesn't pull out even a single millivolt.

Fuck it.

with the camera thing. how difficult would that be? how much experience would one need to be able to pull something like that off.

>other 'fun' projects to keep you motivated when youre starting out

i haven't done something like that, but I imagine it would be quite a difficult project, because the problems you would encounter would be very specific to your project specifically and it might be hard to find good help online. the risk of damaging the components in the removal is high, and it would be hard to tell if you damaged them or your something else in your setup is bad. programming the camera might be easy if the component is not well documented or does not have an open API. in that case, you might have to do some reverse engineering to discover how to get the MCU and the camera talking to each other in this case. could be very difficult.

RPI has some camera modules that were made to interface nicely/learn stuff; otherwise it's hard to say what makes a fun project for you without knowing what interests you

I wish you started this thread a few days later - I'm out of town and can't post pics. I have a handful of different projects going on using stuff ranging from an arduino mega to an ATTINY 85.

Currently building an automated film developer so I'm gathering all of the data to simulate agitation rates / developer depletion levels to achieve the contrast and exposure I want.

I'm also building a nixie clock - right now I need to find a binary-decimal converter that will take 180v.

Thirded