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Hi everyone,
Over the past few days, I have worked and learnt a lot.
First off, I have had the occasion to learn a lot about my STM32, notably during Friday’s Challenge! I have spent more than 10hours with my beloved development board and have tried to make my way through the diverse url of the test with it. Friday has been a tough yet challenging day for my STM32 and I!
After this day of great turmoil, I have decided to focus on the BLE. I have thus had the pleasure of making acquaintance with my Nordic chips. I have started by flashing an example given by Nordic on both boards, but unfortunately, I have not yet managed to make it work since I cannot communicate properly with my dongle through minicom … on both my computer and the A406 machines …
Concerning RoseOnRails, Gleison, Valeh and I have split tasks for the week. As usual, I am going to tackle the issues regarding the LEDs stips. Since we won’t receive them for two to four more days, I am going to write a test for them on my STM32, so that I can play with them as soon as we they arrive! I also need to recover the Hall effect sensor from a former project and borrow some coils from PLUME to test the possibility of deriving the position of the locomotives with Hall effect sensors.
 16 March 2014 @ 9:06  Blyste in LogbookHey !
It has been a while since my last post. It is because I have been really busy. At the end of the week, I spent all my evenings on my STM32 to be able to make the communication challenge. We had indeed to use ethernet with ou board, and if we can’t, we did not receive other instructions… That is why you can understand I was a little bit nervous when the last evening, my ethernet was still not working. But it was quite late (past midnight). So I decided I will end it on the morrow… And, well… It has been tough, but it has been well also… I have nearly finish the challenge. I was quite tired after the challenge (probably the fact that I spend more than 12 hours in front of my pc… and at least 4 hours debugging (at the end).
One more thing : I am actualy in Wien (ATHENS courses), so it would be difficult to work as much as I want. I will not forget you, team Drops N’ Roses. I am just trying to get Expedition PCB on my PC… on Windows…
I never tought I would use Windows for my project…
Well… That is it.
15 March 2014 @ 23:53 lau in LogbookThis morning… I slept!
For the first time in a few days, I had some time to rest, which I enjoyed a lot. Since my last post, I have worked a lot on my STM32 for the lab and the communication challenge. We went on until late yesterday (the door closed at 23:30…), but I did it! After exploring non-deterministic bugs, a lot of documentation, and with the help of my best friend Google, I finally reached the final step. There are so many reasons why I could hate myself yesterday (it’s amazing how many stupid mistakes one can make when working under pressure…), but overall it was a very good experience. I am quite proud of what we achieved (basically, audio streaming) and the whole principle of discovering our board features in an ouverture-facile manner was very fun. This challenge was really a platform game! So, thank you, everybody: Alexis and Sam for organizing it, the students for having suffered with me and the alumni for passing by and encouraging us (the cookies were delicious!).
Therefore, I allowed myself to take some rest as a reward. But as soon as the morning was over, I was back in A406! No rest for the brave. This afternoon, Matthieu and I worked again on establishing a first communication between the BLE kit and an Android phone. While he was working on the kit, I managed the Android part. We agreed to develop the apps in Scala (with the scaloid library), which is much more compact and flexible than Java. But first, I had to remember how to program in Scala! So I spent some time reading documentation on Scala, Android, Scaloid, installing Android SDK, Sbt, and so on. I have now a DropScanner app on my Nexus 4… which does nothing yet, except displaying a text and a button. But tomorrow I will try using the BLE API for scanning.
By the way, be careful if you plan on testing BLE apps with a Nexus 4, since before Android 4.4 it couldn’t unbound Bluetooth Smart devices. Of course, I had not upgraded my Android yet…
15 March 2014 @ 19:39 allegrem in LogbookI can’t program my board today…
Hello World!
It’s been a long time you didn’t hear some news from me, so I have a lot to tell you today! What’s happened since Wednesday? I finally finished my lab, I blew a fuse (not literally) during the challenge and I recovered the Force today with some BLE. Now, details!
I spent my whole Wednesday and Thursday trying to finish the lab. On Wednesday I finished to make the serial over USB driver work. Actually I had chosen the wrong example, that’s why I was not working the day before. Then I activated the debug options of ChibiOS and realized that my buzzer was not buzzing any more. A few fixes later, I began the last but not the least part of the lab: get a web page using HTTP (and therefore TCP/IP). It was hard and tough, but on Thursday 8:22PM, I was able to download the home page of the Télécom ParisTech website (this tremendous achievement was immediately added to my resume). It was now time to leave for the party rest before the Friday challenge.
So I woke up in the mornin’ feelin’ like P-Diddy, and I discovered the first part of the challenge: retrieve the rest of the instructions on a web page. The good news was that I already had a working code able to do that. The bad news was that I decided (and don’t ask me why, I honestly have no idea) to plug the brand new JLink probe we just received on my board. Disaster ensues… It took me one hour to get my old good JTAG probe working. Then I could retrieve the instructions explaining that our next mission (and we had to accept it) would be to download a sound using HTTP (easy) and play it on earphones (sounds easy, it was not). I started to investigate the ChibiOS and the board documentations, and a few hours later, I had understood that: we needed to use I2S, ChibiOS already had a I2S driver, this driver was not working on our board, we had to write our own driver. So I did. In the end, my configuration was ok, but I stupidly had forgotten to edit my Makefile so that it used my new board configuration (I hated myself so much at that time !!). I also spent around one hour to fix an incomprehensible bug (I don’t want to talk about it, it still affects me a lot). Then I was able to play a 440Hz sine wave (it was 6:04PM). The next step was to play the downloaded sound (or more precisely: to stream it). Unfortunately I had to leave for a web meetup I was co-organizing. I came back after it but I was not brave enough to dive again in my code, so I helped Adele to finish the challenge.
Today, I finally had time to sleep, so I did! Then I fixed a few mistakes in the Git presentation (you know, the one with Jedi inside!). I don’t know yet if I can publish it here, but if it’s possible, I’ll do it! Here it is: Git for Jedi
I also continued to work on the nRF51822 (my new best friend since I officially broke up with my STM32). My job was to run an example program on the board, which would advertise and do other fun things. The program was already written, but the tough part was to actually run it on the board. About this, I strongly recommend this GitHub which was extremely helpful. Tomorrow, I will try to write my own example program. And I will conclude with an amazing video I made proving the unlimited power of the dark side of the BLE:
May the force be with you!
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