Getting Started with NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano with help from Shawn Hymel

By Michael de Silva @bsodmike Jul 15, 2024, 12:00am UTC
Embedded, Ubuntu, Machine Learning, Jetson Orin, NVIDIA

Having been a long time fan of SparkFun, any probably most of us in the Electronics and maker space, have at least at some point, seen Shawn with his bright red bow-tie and wonderful Video content.

Couple weeks ago, I decided to dust of an older Jetson Xavier Nano but stumbled on a post by Shawn featuring a more up to date "Orin Nano". Price wise, the 8GB model was more accessible as I'm still just playing around in the ML space, and it is a decent starter platform.

Since my board was to run the latest Jetpack v6.x I realised (with Shawn's help) I would need to use the SDK Manager approach, and this involves running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

Booting of a live CD (sorry, USB stick!) should be easy right? well, not if ...(continued)

Starter code-bases - Are they worth it? Not everyone thinks so.

By Michael de Silva @bsodmike Jul 13, 2024, 12:00am UTC
Code & Tech, C++

Starters are popular on Github. Try googling for "Node starter" or "Python starter" (which you don't need really). But this concept makes more sense say for a Node Webpack and Typescript starter. I asked about a C++ (Cpp) starter on Reddit and got a bit of flame - which is fair. This is because I partially recalled the ModernCppStarter, which I had used ages ago.

I also used the terminology FFI and they hate this as they are used to "extern C". You can see some of the comments here.

This is less of a "thing" in specific languages such as C++ / Rust etc as we don't use starters, just the language and curate the best dependencies for the task at hand.

The "Starter" concept is more pre ...(continued)

Avoiding the Arduino Portenta H7 "Orange LED of Hell" with STM32CubeIDE

By Michael de Silva @bsodmike May 17, 2024, 12:00am UTC
Arduino, STM32, STM32H747XI, Portenta, Portenta H7

Whilst working on the earlier UART code with the Portenta H7, I wanted to ensure I was running the correct SMT32 power config, and decided to generate the config and run this on my Portenta H7.

Unfortunately, the STM32CubeIDE tools flash into memory 0x08000000 instead of 0x08040000, the significance here is that the bootloader resides between these two addresses. When the bootloader is effectively wiped from the H7, its Power Management controller IC (PMIC) is no longer correctly configured at cold-start, and this renders your board as DOA with the "Orange LED from Hell".

Rust RTOS in STM32: The first challenge, Blocking UART on Arduino Portenta H7

By Michael de Silva @bsodmike Apr 28, 2024, 12:00am UTC
Rust, Arduino, STM32, STM32H747XI, Portenta, Portenta H7

Dear reader, please be warned as I'm about to take you on a journey that one really shouldn't have to embark on. The premise is simple, I want to send and read some data via UART (or commonly known as RS232/Serial comms).

This is pretty much your Embedded 101 task, and back in my day at University, this was something I'd bit-bang on a PIC mcu or rely on a hardware USART peripheral to get the job done. I wanted to do the same thing, in bare-metal Rust + Embassy.

Should be easy right?

Well, in all fairness, it takes about 2-3 minutes to download a simple Arduino "sketch" to do the same thing, and the code is quite succinct.

/*
 * Serial echo for the Arduino Portenta H7
 * 
 * This is a simple example, and can be cleaned up a lot more.
 * 
 * Copyright (c) 2024 Michael de  ...(continued)

Virtualised Gitlab setup with XCP-ng

By Michael de Silva @bsodmike Apr 21, 2024, 12:00am UTC
VMs, XCP-NG, Gitlab

This has been a long time coming, and I finally pulled up my shorts and wired up some SuperMicro servers I ordered last year.

This is the hardware setup.

Setting up the Gitlab host was based on a popular docker-compose repo on Github, but fine tuning its internal configs is orchestrated via Ansible. I have an extensive Ansible code-base that not only bootstraps a separate GoCD cluster, but the GoCD cluster itself, re-reuns the same Ansible playbooks to "bootstrap" itself, sort of in a recursive manner (It's kinda like how you build a 3D pr ...(continued)

HOWTO Setting up a RAK3172 Evaluation Board (with STM32WLE5CC) and Chirpstack

By Michael de Silva @bsodmike Mar 27, 2024, 12:00am UTC
STM32, LoRaWAN, Chirpstack, RAK RUI, Arduino IDE

This board has a STM32WLE5CC which is based on the RAK3372. We will be following the RAK documentation for running a basic verification to ensure that our device and hotspots are working.

I am assuming you are already running at least one configured Helium hotspot; I am using a few RAK hotspots for this demo.

We will be using the RAK RUI SDK version 4.1.1_273 (as this is the latest right now) using the staging branch in ...(continued)

Updated homelab server

By Michael de Silva @bsodmike Mar 15, 2024, 12:00am UTC
Networking, FreeNAS, Servers, Ubiquity, Xen-Server, Citrix, XCP-NG, Homelab, Infrastructure, Unifi, pfSense, Routers, Firewall, VMs

Quick look at the updated server stack, well at least the main server stack.

Sometimes I do silly things, even when the Rust compiler is trying to help (Impl Traits)...

By Michael de Silva @bsodmike Feb 25, 2024, 12:00am UTC
Rust, Rustlang, Embedded, ARM, Bare-metal

Today I spent a bit of time scratching my head as I've been integrating a crate I wrote a long-time ago on ESP32 bare-metal rust into a new project with the Embassy-stm32 HAL (for ARM, in my case the STM32H747XI chip).

Here's the offending code:

impl<'a, I2C> RTClock<'a, I2C>
where
    I2C: embedded_hal_1::i2c::I2c<Error = BoardError>,
{
    #[allow(dead_code)]
    pub fn new(bus_manager: BusManagerCortexM<I2cDriver<'a>>) -> Result<Self, BoardError> {
        Ok(Self {
            datetime: None,
            bus_manager,
            phantom: PhantomData,
        })
    }
    // snip...
}

Bear with me as the error takes a bit of reading, but we'll break it down

error[E0599]: the function or associated item `new` exists for struct `RTClock< ...(continued)

Debugging ARM Cortex-M with Jlink-mini and Arduino (Portenta H7) GIGA R1 WiFi board (with Rust bare metal) with VSCode

By Michael de Silva @bsodmike Feb 4, 2024, 12:00am UTC
Embedded, Arduino, STM32, ARM, Bare-metal, STM32H747XI

I was having a few issues with my GIGA R1 WiFi board, well, actually, one of them has totally died on me (it no longer enters into DFU mode) so I've raised a support ticket with Arduino themselves.

There isn't much information online covering Rust bare-metal and the GIGA R1 WiFi board in particular but I found this blog post called "Visual Studio Code for C/C++ with ARM Cortex-M: Part 4 - Debug" which helped confirm some of my VSCode configuration.

I also came across this Cortex M Quickstart repo on Github which helped as a clean starting point. Of course, I needed to make updates for the target device (S ...(continued)

Arduino (Portenta H7) GIGA R1 WiFi Display Demo with HTTP Request

By Michael de Silva @bsodmike Jan 29, 2024, 12:00am UTC
Embedded, Arduino, C++, STM32

This is a quick demo of using the Arduino (Portenta H7) GIGA R1 WiFi board with its display shield. This features a STM32H747XI microcontroller which is described as

High-performance and DSP with DP-FPU, Arm Cortex-M7 + Cortex-M4 MCU with 2MBytes of Flash memory, 1MB RAM, 480 MHz CPU, Art Accelerator, L1 cache, external memory interface, large set of peripherals, SMPS

In this example I wanted to fetch some data over HTTP and render "pages" on screen.

Video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHf2jF2Lj_U