So far, there’s an idea, a circuit to collect energy, and sample code to make an LPC810 come alive every so often, briefly. It’s time to tie things together and see what happens!

As usual, one article per day in this week’s episode:

• Setting up a test power source – Wed
• The first MPS circuit – Thu
• Yes, the MPS lives, but… – Fri
• Adding a voltage monitor – Sat

As you will see in Saturday’s article, this first MPS design is indeed able to power an LPC810 µC after some modifications, and keep it alive “under certain conditions”.

But there’s a very nasty skeleton in the closet – stay tuned!

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It’s time to tackle a fairly ambitious challenge: let’s try to make an LPC810 run off “harvested” energy and use it to periodically send out a wireless packet.

This week will be a short intro into the matter, with more to follow later:

• Picking up magnetic energy – Wed
• Collecting energy into a reservoir – Thu
• First goal: just some blips – Fri

To lift the veil a bit, here’s the energy I’m going to try to harvest:

This is the voltage from a Current Transformer (CT), when unloaded. Such a CT needs to be “clamped” around one of the wires in an AC mains cable, and will then generate a voltage which is proportional to the amount of current flowing in that wire.

Well, maybe, sort of…

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This week is about uploading firmware over a serial communication link, and interacting with the uploaded firmware.

First a quick recap on how it all works, then a little diagnostic tool, and then a little utility with some new powers. Your Odroids and Raspberries will never be the same again!

The article schedule for the coming days is as follows:

• Re-flashing an ARM chip – Wed
• Let’s find out what’s going on – Thu
• Uploading via a USB interface – Fri
• Uploading (just about) anywhere – Sat

The goal: freedom from having lots of USB cables all over the desk – at last…

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By popular request…

Several people have mentioned these topics to me recently, as being something they’d like to know more about. All of it is available from various textbooks of course, but it’s often buried deeply in more elaborate chapters. It seems like a good idea to single these out, especially if you’re quite fluent in programming a higher-level language other than C/C++.

Interestingly, all these topics turn out to be related in some way to memory maps, such as this somewhat arbitrary example from Wikipedia:

Low level programming is all about wrestling with such details, very “close to the silicon”.

The other topics which tend to trip people up coming from JavaScript, Python, PHP, Java, etc. are about how bits, bytes, and words can be manipulated, how to deal with memory areas for arrays and buffers, how types work in C/C++, and how a CPU copes with urgency:

• Low-level programming – Wed
• Lots of bits and pieces – Thu
• Pointer addressing – Fri
• Casting types in C/C++ – Sat
• We interrupt this program – Sun

I’ll keep the articles concise and only touch on the aspects relevant to embedded programs.

… but feel free to take a week off from reading this weblog if you already know all this!

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