Adventures in Embedding

If you are trying to setup your Quicklogic EOS-S3 Thing Plus (Thing+), then you have come to the right place. The goal of this series is to describe the journey Joe and I went on to setup the Thing+ so you can spend less time setting it up and more time making cool stuff. I will be using Linux for these tutorials. I have done some of these steps in Windows as well and if you have questions about that, feel free to leave a comment below. This guide focuses on setting up the Thing+ with an open source SWD programmer, if you have or want to use a J-Link programmer, Sparkfun has a guide for that here:  https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/quicklogic-thing-plus-eos-s3-hookup-guide   This is also a very good resource to learn about the hardware and pin layouts. The Thing+ has an SDK called QORC which was released by Quicklogic. Among other things, the QORC SDK is supposed to allow programming the microcontroller and FPGA over USB. However, as of January 2023, the firmware on the Spa...

We set out to have a project that just turned on an LED. Joe figured out how to do this and then he found a function called HAL_RTC_SetupAlarm which can call a function every x seconds. He made a function to switch the led color every 1 second. We were consistently making and uploading new versions using qfprog which was very satisfying in its own right. It shows just how far we've come.  I was able to load up Joe's example code to the board and then prove I was actually debugging the chip by placing a breakpoint on the setupAlarm function and each time I hit continue, the LED would change color. I could also step around if I needed to.

Northern Lights Have you ever wanted to see the Northern Lights in its full glory? My friends and I decided to journey to Iceland in November and it's the event I am most looking forward to this year. We have been planning this trip since early 2023 and as we get closer, it's becoming more real. I've seen the Northern Lights in movies and pictures, but I can only imagine how breathtaking it will be in person. This phenomenon makes me think of a doorway to a different universe. For someone who grew up on science fiction, this experience will be like a fantasy realized. Travel Planning I am also looking forward to the country itself and traveling with friends I don't see very often. Exploring new places and trying new cuisines are two of my favorite things, and doing both with friends is just the icing on the cake. We plan to see the whole island in about 12 days, driving along the perimeter and stopping at various sights along the way. We are preparing for this trip b...

 The Jeff Probe is a simplified version of a Black Magic Debug probe and it uses the Black Magic Debug software to talk between the computer and the chip being programmed. As of March 2023, the Jeff probe we bought from Sparkfun didn't have firmware that communicated with the Black Magic software, so we need to update it using a program called DFU-UTIL. On Linux, the package can be installed using your package manager, On Windows, you will need to find an EXE version and install the correct driver using Zadig. Once DFU-UTIL is installed, download the current release of the Jeff Probe here:  https://github.com/flirc/blackmagic/releases/tag/v1.8.4 . Unzip the file and go to firmware/blackmagic_fw folder in the terminal. The Jeff probe will need to be in DFU mode to program it. To enter this mode, hold down while you are plugging the probe into your computer. You should only see one green light. Enter the following command, you may have to run it as sudo:     ...