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From the monthly archives: January 2013
We are pleased to present below all posts archived in 'January 2013'. If you still can't find what you are looking for, try using the search box.
This is a good question when it comes from people with no experience on embedded devices and a very bad one when you hear it coming from people that work on embedded devices. “I’m using a PC inside my embedded device, so I can use Windows as I use it on my PC” this is usually a statement made by people who actually design bad embedded devices. And those devices are not bad because they use a PC-based hardware (using a PC may be a good solution for some kind of devices where developing a custom board is too expensive and does not provide any real advantage in terms of cost), not because they use Windows. It’s because they use a Windows version designed for PCs, and so they behave like a PC and not like an embedded device! A PC has always a user taking care of it (or calling for help when something goes wrong beyond his recovery capabilities!), an embedded device must run unattended. Users don’t want or even can’t interact with it. It must be able to solve its own issues and, at least, report errors by itse ...
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Using Windows Embedded Standard 7 you can quickly build an Operating System configuration that support your hardware and include only the components required to run your application. Being able to customize the set of packages that are included in your image has multiple advantages: - reduced footprint (you’ll save storage and memory giving more resources to your application) - improved security (some services may have bugs that allows remote exploits and can become a security issue, removing them if they are not needed on your device will improve security) - improved reliability (less code, less bugs ). In Windows Embedded Standard 7 you can generate a set-up DVD or thumbdrive that can be used to install the operating system and your application on a target machine. Doing a full setup on each device could be a suitable solution, but it has some drawbacks. Setup may take a long time and may require some user interaction, some components may need to be installed or configured after the main OS setup etc ...
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The project on the weather station that I have already published on CodePlex is the subject of one of the blog posts Coding4Fun on Channel9, as always managed by Greg Duncan.
It just been officially announced on the Netduino forum the release of the new version of the base of the SecretLabs boards : the Netduino 2 !
After the release of the second version of the board that has Ethernet connectivity and microSD onboard, the Netduino Plus 2, the entry-level version board has a successor even more powerful.
Microprocessor and memory
Following the same line of Netduino Plus 2, the microprocessor is completely different from that of its predecessor, in fact it is a STM32F2 (from STMicroelectronics) based on architecture Cortex-M3 to 120MHz in place of an Atmel ARM7 to 48 Mhz. The jump of memory is amazing! The amount of available RAM is 60 KB and for Flash the amount available to our application goes from 128 to 192 KB.
Input and Output
The board provides 22 GPIO pins (compared to 20 above), part of which have the following features:
6 PWM;
4 UART;
SPI interface;
I2C interface;
In addition, there are 6-channel ADC with a resolution of 12 bits (rather tha ...
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![Cattura_thumb[2]_thumb](http://www.embedded101.com/Portals/0/SunBlogNuke/15/Windows-Live-Writer/67ab75fc8429_A998/Cattura_thumb%5B2%5D_thumb_thumb.jpg "Cattura_thumb[2]_thumb")
uPLibrary, dedicated to. NET Micro Framework, which I started developing for over a year and upgrade over time with new features has been reported on Channel 9 in Blog Coding4Fun thanks to the efforts of Greg Duncan at the following link.
The version 1.9 of uPLibrary is enriched with another managed driver for the management of an anemometer, an instrument used for measuring the wind speed. The driver is generic, considering the common operation for most of all anemometers.
The anemometer I used generates 4 pulses per second to the detection of a wind speed of 10 Km / h; such information is useful to determine the true wind speed by counting pulses in a time interval that can be set. In fact, Anemometer The class provides a constructor whose parameters are the following:
inPin: Pin board used and it is connected to the output signal pulse anemometer;
calculatePeriod: period in which the driver must observe and assess the wind speed (the default value is 5000 ms);
referenceWindSpeed: reference wind speed in km / h (the default is 10);
referencePulseForSecond: number of pulses per second reference (the default value is 4);
As you can see the default values of the driver are those of the anemometer used for testing ...
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Beginning of the year ... the uPLibrary grows and upgrade to version 1.9 !
One of the new features added is the managed driver for the temperature and humidity sensor SHT1x of Sensirion, which is available in a convenient breakout board of DFRobot.
The communication protocol is expected to be a non-standard I2C, so the .Net Micro Framework classes dedicated I2C are unusable. In this case, the only solution is the bit banging, through which the date and clock signals are driven directly by software. The implemented class SHT1x provides a constructor which pass the two pins used for the aforesaid signals over the power supply voltage supplied to the sensor. The latter information is necessary for the implementation of compensation formulas for the calculation of the actual value of temperature and humidity from the data read from the sensor. The methods exposed are trivially as follows:
ReadTemperature (): provides the measured temperature, on the basis of the unit of measure passed as a parameter ...
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![cloudybar_thumb[4]](http://www.embedded101.com/Portals/0/SunBlogNuke/15/Windows-Live-Writer/Netduino-Plus-Weather-Station-_FAB2/cloudybar_thumb%5B4%5D_thumb.png "cloudybar_thumb[4]")
I’m pleased to introduce you my new open source project on CodePlex…..Net Micro Framework Weather Station !
This project helps you to build a weather station based on .Net Micro Framework. The data come from some sensors (temperature, humidity, luminosity and wind speed) and you can read them, in real time, using a Web page on the integrated Web Server. Enabling data logging, you can save your data into a microSD.
![Img1_thumb[2]](http://www.embedded101.com/Portals/0/SunBlogNuke/15/Windows-Live-Writer/Netduino-Plus-Weather-Station-_FAB2/Img1_thumb%5B2%5D_thumb.jpg "Img1_thumb[2]")
The project is built for Netduino Plus board and based on .Net Micro Framework 4.2 but you can use a different board changing only the pin for the sensors connections.
It uses Metro UI CSS (http://metroui.org.ua/) for Metro style Web page.
![Img2_thumb[2]](http://www.embedded101.com/Portals/0/SunBlogNuke/15/Windows-Live-Writer/Netduino-Plus-Weather-Station-_FAB2/Img2_thumb%5B2%5D_thumb.jpg "Img2_thumb[2]")