Another year, another Maker Faire. Yes! for this year it is nolonger “Mini Maker Faire”, we’ve just upgraded to the full fledged “Maker Faire” event. As Singapore Maker Faire has grown 10 times compare to 3 year ago, I am not able to cover every single booth or exhibit in the event. I only write about those I’m interested in.

An Augmented Reality Sandbox is a perfect application of Kinect. Originate at UC Davis, this construction is made by the students from Temasek Secondary School.

Benjamin Low and “Art makes us” team, who made the “Synesthete’s Music Machine” last year, have came back with “Neobombe”, a simulation of   Turing machine inspired by the movie “The Imitation Game”. This setup contains 11 Arduinos driving 36 step motors. The motors spin according to the enigma decipher algorithm running at backend. Since I’m too late to write his, Ben has already published his “making-of” article here.

Leon Lim, who is the “go-to” person for DIY PCB etching in the community, bought us two day’s worth of live etching and soldering workshop. Participants have experienced PCB etching using household suppliers, drilling and soldering. The end product is a cardboard dome with colorful LED lighting, very nice!

This ball shaped robot is developed by IDA Labs. It travels on the ground and also in water. But I really do want to see a BB-8 leh. Maybe next year?

Here comes some heavy weight electronics project. Design by Adnan of 2-Watt Elements,  Chippy is an “Intel Edison powered USB hub” Intel Edison breakout board that helps developer to access Edison peripherals much much easier. Interested people please take note, Chippy is coming to market coming September.

More interesting projects from local and overseas guest are better capture using video format:

Yearly Review

As I said Maker Faire is like a new year’s day to me. The past year is an exciting year, that I am able to monetize my project. I designed an ESP8266 breakout board and start selling on Tindie since February. As of today, I sold total 332 boards across 29 countries.  And this is mainly why I have not been updating this blog too frequently, because I totally underestimated the effort went into the production and sales of these boards. My initial idea was just to sell some extra pieces from my prototype lot and recover part of the cost. But in the process it becomes so welcomed that my I can hardly fulfill orders. I’ve not able to write too much code for ESP8266 either, which is a great pity.

A “good” news is ever since Adafruit, OLIMEX and Sparkfun start to produce their versions of ESP8266 development board, my sales drops like brick wall. But this gives me more time to work on the software side and do some new projects, stay tuned

And since I’ve done so much on ESP8266, I can’t help bring a project to Maker Faire. So this is my selfie with ESP8266 clock. The clock synchronize time from NTP, gather temperature/humidity and push to a MQTT broker, and display MQTT messages from my webpage (more on this in the following posts).

A big THANKS to Mr Teo Swee Ann and Espressif Systems to make this possible.

Rant

I hesitated a bit before write this part. It will hurt someone, for sure.

ARDUINO IS NOT ELECTRONICS!

I have been talking to some makers, attending some events, and people seems to mistake Arduino as the only electronics platform.

ARDUINO IS NOT ELECTRONICS!

I have to admit Arduino helps to lower the entrance barrier, bring people onboard electronics, which is fantastic. But do not claim you understand electronics because you can follow some online tutorials and create some Arduino projects.

The same applies to Raspberry Pi, Banana Pi, Beagle Bone, etc.

I don’t know whole lot of electronics either.

I come across the Nah’s family who present this electronics learning kit in the Maker Faire. I personally give them the best project award.

This basic components block kit immediately reminds me of the Radioshark laboratory kit (clone) I started with. There is no shortcut to learning electronics. You still have to start with basic components and Ohm’s law.

For more expert advise, I highly recommend this eevBLAB episode.

/Rant over.

The post Maker Faire, Yearly Review, and Rant appeared first on Digital Me.

The new utility, named ST2Makefile, is available on https://github.com/baoshi/ST2Makefile

My limited testing shows it works for most example projects in ST’s library package, as well as STM32CubeMX exported projects. One thing needs tweaking could be that some ST’s example project contains duplicated source files. If you receive error message such as “Symbol already defined in XXX” during linking, please check the SRCS section for any duplicated source entries.

The usage is changed a little since CubeMX2Makefile.py, now you should run:

[code light=”true”]
ST2Makefile.py <TrueSTUDIO project location>
[/code]

where you can identify TrueSTUDIO project location by locating “.project” and “.cproject” files inside it.

As usual, some useful resources:

Useful links

ST2Makefile: https://github.com/baoshi/ST2Makefile
ARM GCC: https://launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded

My packaged GNU Make for Win32: https://ba0sh1com.files.wordpress.com/2020/09/2c1c9-make.zip

The post TrueSTUDIO STM32 project to GCC Makefile converter appeared first on Digital Me.

UPDATE

Always get update from https://github.com/baoshi/CubeMX2Makefile The code is now based on SW4STM32 project output. Thanks various contributors to make this possible.

Deprived off electronics lab back in Singapore, a Chinese new year holiday here in Shanghai home is perfect for some software projects. I have little exposure with Python but after two days of Googling (through VPN) and copy/paste, a crude CubeMX2Makefile utility is ready, available at https://github.com/baoshi/CubeMX2Makefile (OOP aficionados please forgive my spaghetti styled code. It works is it?)

As the name suggests, the program converts STM32CubeMX project into a GNU Makefile. Here is a mini-HOWTO:

1. Create a STM32CubeMX project, configure pins, peripherals and MiddleWare, then edit project settings as follows: (choose SW4STM32 instead of TrueStudio in the picture below)

   

   Make sure the Tool/IDE selection is TrueSTUDIO 4.3.1 (as of STM32CubeMX 4.6.0), and note down the “Toolchain Folder Location”. I found it necessary to empty the old “Toolchain Folder” before each code generation, otherwise the project file just keep growing regardless of settings (this could be a bug in STM32CubeMX). See update below.

2. Download the project from the Github repo below, extract files to a folder, say “C:CubeMX2Makefile”. Install Python 2.7 Win32 from www.python.org

   [code light=”true”]
   c:CubeMX2Makefile>dir /b
   .gitattributes
   .gitignore
   CubeMX2Makefile.py
   CubeMX2Makefile.tpl
   readme.md
   [/code]

3. From command prompt, execute CubeMX2Makefile.py, e.g,

   [code light=”true”]
   c:CubeMX2Makefile>CubeMX2Makefile.py R:411ProjTestF4
   File created: R:411ProjTestF4Makefile
   [/code]

4. Cd into “Toolchain Folder Locaiton”, make project, i.e.,

   [code light=”true”]
   R:411ProjTestF4>make
   …
   arm-none-eabi-size build/TestF4.elf
   text data bss dec hex filename
   5876 12 1056 6944 1b20 build/TestF4.elf
   arm-none-eabi-objcopy -O ihex build/TestF4.elf build/TestF4.hex
   [/code]

   Refer to blog and below links for ARM GCC and make utility installation. It will be much easier to import the Makefile project into Eclipse CDT for code editing and debugging.

Useful links

CubeMX2Makefile: https://github.com/baoshi/CubeMX2Makefile

STM32Cube: http://www.st.com/stm32cube

ARM GCC: https://launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded

My packaged GNU Make for Win32: https://ba0sh1com.files.wordpress.com/2020/09/2c1c9-make.zip

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