VinzTech

This post is especially an outing of my joy now that I have finally resolved my issue debugging the STM32F4xx using OpenOcd. There exist many blogpost, tutorials, manuals about setting up an STM32F4Discovery + OpenOcd + gdb combo. I won't explain how to do it here, but it is an awesome, powerful and very cheap set-up. I chose the STM32F4Discovery board as the demo board for my course on embedded C, because it's cheap, full of features and has on-board debugging hardware. Writing a custom crt0, I ran into problems however. Stepping through the early init code, assembly instruction per assembly instruction, gdb would just lock-up, freeze, at random moments. Not always on the same instruction, not always at the same moment. I could also set a breakpoint on a certain line, then type 'c' to continue, and the debugger would never break, or even respond to a Ctrl+C. Furthermore, using st-util, from the texane github ( https://github.com/texane/stlink ) would work.It&#

Another awesome project I've been busy with: I'm working for a company ( TASS ) that is specialized in embedded systems development and consultancy, and we have been working for quite some time on the PicoTCP project. This is a TCPI/IP stack, with a small footprint (so very suitable for embedded systems) and a very complete feature-set. You can check it out for yourself, since it's free: (GPL v2, but dual-licensed should you want to use for your company) https://github.com/tass-belgium/picotcp We have demos of the stack running under linux with a virtual ethernet device (VDE), and on a whole bunch of development boards, such as the STM32F4 boards, a Ti Stellaris Board, a PIC24, ... Check it out!

Ok, What have I been up to (technically speaking) ? Mostly, two things: The STM32F4-Discovery board which is a cheap and awesome developmentboard by STMicroelectronics boasting an ARM Cortex-M4 and an on-board JTAG-dongle so to speak: That opens a lot of interresting perspectives. But I'll talk about that in a next blogpost. The second thing is a combinations of the following technologies: GPS trackers + SMS + USB GSM Modem + Java + JavaScript + Google Maps. The idea is to have live tracking of about 20 GPS-trackers on a Google Map. This would serve as central intelligence center in a big real-life "hunting" game we're preparing at the moment to play with about 100 youngsters in the city of Tongeren. It will be called "Nacht van de Jacht", for those interrested :). The set-up I thought of was the following: We bought about 20 Chinese GPS trackers that are sending their position in an SMS to a central phone number every 3 minutes or so. These SMSes ar