Spice Shredder

I wanted to motorize a cheap IKEA spice grinder, which was a silly idea for a project.

But it got me back into mechanical modeling and 3D printing, so here are the results (video).

The full write-up is part of the GitHub repo that has all the design files (https://github.com/nuket/SpiceShredder) and the STL files you could use to print this yourself.

If it’s helpful for you, or you have modifications that could improve the design, feel free to drop me a line!

STM32 Virtual COM Port Issues

For some reason, the Virtual Com Port (VCP) drivers for STM32 chips were acting up and not properly enumerating a usable COM port on Windows when I was testing an STM32L476 chip.

I’m not sure if this is a chip-specific issue or if this problem shows up on more chips using the STM32Cube Hardware Abstraction Layer.

(Even after I installed Atollic TrueSTUDIO and the older STSW-LINK004 Windows utility, which I like better than the new STM32CubeProgrammer because it doesn’t require Java.)

Continue reading STM32 Virtual COM Port Issues

Does Microchip have a C++11 / C++14 / C++17 compiler for their 8-bit microcontrollers?

Not really.

Only the AVR series chips from the Atmel acquisition have this support, when using the open source GCC suite. And even then, their official compiler build is pretty old.

Continue reading Does Microchip have a C++11 / C++14 / C++17 compiler for their 8-bit microcontrollers?

mbed-memory-status Supports SWO Now

A quick note: I finally got around to updating mbed-memory-status to support outputting data using the Serial Wire Output port on a Nordic nRF52 Development Kit.

The trick to getting it work was, as usual with Nordic stuff, a compiler #define (-DENABLE_SWO to be exact). Took a bit of digging to figure this one out and get it working.

This actually lead to some further investigation and the interesting discovery that SWO could possibly offer an extra output-only serial port on most Cortex-M3-and-up chips. But, there are still some blockers on getting that thought working and I haven’t had the time to clear them.