Single Port BMS MOSFETs Explained

Tags: Electronics, Solar

I'm writing this post since it seems there seems to be some confusion on why both MOSFETs in a typical single port BMS (Battery Management System) are controlled individually and why/how this works when they're in the same series circuit. It will hopefully also show why just controlling both MOSFETs at the same time to try and accomplish this is not a good idea.

Low Cost 10kW Solar System - One Year Later

Tags: Electronics, Finland, Hardware, Solar


Panel Ground Mount


Partial Solar Eclipse over Finland Today

Tags: Other

Eclipse 2021


Tags: Electronics, Finland, Hardware, Solar


Solar Power

STM32 Minimal Development Environment

Tags: ARM, Embedded, Programming

In the past I have written on the advantages of minimal development environments (read: Makefiles and GCC, no IDE, minimal abstraction layers) for ARM processors. One of the advantages of working this way is easy integration with existing processes such as build systems, production line, testing, etc. Using this in a virtualized environment also allows one to make sure every developer uses the same tools, and that the tools are tested and qualified for the intended project with a ready made virtual image available for each developer. They can then add their favorite editor and user interface, but the underlying build environment is fixed for everyone and archived as such on a per-project basis. This means that if a customer comes back a year or two later and wants to make a change, all the tools are there as we left them ready to make the change. In this blog post I'll write down a possible scenario for a typical STM32 project, in this case using a NUCLEO-L152RE board as a target. It should be easy to adapt to other STM32 boards/chips, and in general other ARM microcontrollers as well.

Programmer on chair

Standard Peripherals Library vs CMSIS vs HAL vs Low Level Library

Tags: ARM, C, Electronics, Embedded, Programming

The STM32 line of microcontrollers offer a bunch of features in a nice package at reasonable cost, something I like. What I don't like as much are the development libraries around it provided by ST. For this reason, most of the time I stick to writing code using the 'Cortex Microcontroller Software Interface Standard' (CMSIS) and the datasheet, and this works nicely but can be slow to develop. While it's still my personal favorite, I recently checked out the other options to see where things are going to do the prep work for some ports of older projects built using the 'Standard Peripherals Library' to newer processors such as the STM32L4.




Anyone Can Code...

Tags: Other, Programming

Every time I hear the "everybody can/should/has to code" line...

Anyone Can Code

Flashing STM32L15X EEPROM with STLink under Linux

Tags: Embedded, Linux, Programming





On Processes and Threads

Tags: C, Computer Architecture, Linux, Programming

Some time ago I followed an interesting discussion on a board where people were discussing multi-core software development. During the course of the discussion it became apparent that there is a lot of confusion and misconceptions about a 'process' and a 'thread' as they exist on e.g., a Linux system. Both are applicable to make use of multi-core systems, but they do so in different ways. Even though the exact distinction while compared to early definitions of the terms has perhaps become somewhat blurred, the two remain separate entities which can complement each other perfectly. In this post I'm going to try and illustrate the similarities and differences, and show you some real life scenarios of both. Keep in mind that we will be making some generalizations - and there are lots of examples where these generalizations do not directly apply, or where there are other possible implementations of the cited examples. Going into these would turn this blog entry into an entire book...


Web Proxy

Tags: Network, Security

We just launched a free web proxy service: Not only will it help you get around firewalls and sites blocked by your ISP, it does so without logging user data. Oh, and we're 'Not Subject to American Law' - in reference to the recent NSA surveillance debacle ;-)


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