Tomorrow morning we will be hosting 16 second level students for a Breaboard games workshop. The board and code are changed a little from last year as the focus will be more on writing python progr…| ioprog
I was looking for an exercise for students to work on relating to the BBC Microbit V2 and Zephyr when I came across some low cost flash SPI chips on Aliexpress. These are 8 pin DIL chips which work well… Continue reading →| ioprog
This event’s focus is not so much on delivering a finished game as delivering a platform for learning micropython. The board consists of a SeedStudio/Xiao RPI2040 which has just enough pins f…| ioprog
I came across some GD32E230K8T6 microcontrollers on Aliexpress. They contain an ARM Cortex M23 that can run up to 72MHz, 64kB of Flash and 8kB of RAM. They were on sale for 72c so I had to try them…| ioprog
Making decisions Up until now, the microprocessors I have dealt with made decisions using the following pattern: compare A to B branch if higher/lower/same etc to somewhere else The compare instruc…| ioprog
Arithmetic calculations The code below shows addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Immediate addition and subtraction are the same instruction ; you add a negative sign to the immedia…| ioprog
The microcontroller pictured above is a curiosity. It is labelled STM32F0C8T6 and it is in an LQFP-32 package. According to ST’s datasheet, the STM32F0C8 is an LQFP-48 device so this chip sho…| ioprog
Quadrature encoders are used for measuring motor rotational speed and direction. They can be optical or magnetic just like the one below. This quadrature encoder has two Hall effect sensors which a…| ioprog
Registers The GD32VF103 has 32 CPU core registers (x0 to x31) each of which is 32 bits wide. There is also a 32 bit program counter (pc) (instruction pointer). Apart from x0 which is read-only and …| ioprog
Setting up the development environment I was looking around for a board to tinker with RV32 assembly language as a way of getting to know the architecture a bit better. I tried using a WCH-Li…| ioprog