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Get ARMed with knowledge

Over the years I've done quite a bit of teaching.

I did a stint of adult education when I lived in Rotorua back in the 1980s and I did the same when I lived in Auckland about 8 years later.

Many of the videos I make these days have an educational aspect to them (example) and I enjoy sharing my knowledge.

Right now I'm about to embark on a little bit of learning and wondered how many would like to come along for the ride.

One thing I've learned over the years is that the best time to share your knowledge is not so much once you're an "expert" - but while you're learning yourself. "Experts" often assume too much prior knowledge on the part of the student and can all too easily gloss over essential foundations of understanding -- making it very hard for others to keep up or assimilate the more complex concepts.

So what will I be learning?

Well I've just received my STM32F4 Discovery board with it's super-narly ARM processor and a handful of assorted peripherals -- and now it's time to get to grips with it.

I've done a lot of design and programming with other microcontrollers such as the PIC range from Microchip and the Atmel 8-bit units but the 32-bit ARM is like an Arduino on steroids.

For a microcontroller - it's grunty!

Not only do you get the 32-bit MCU running at a speedy lick but the MCU itself has a whole megabyte of programme memory (in Flash), 192KB of RAM and some EEPROM for good measure.

This makes the old IBM PC, or even the PC-AT look decidedly pedestrian!

The cool thing about this particular evaluation/development board is that it also has a built-in programmer which hooks up to your PC via the USB port. That's handy!

Then there is the 3-axis accelerometer which is also hiding away on the PCB. Ever wanted to build your own Segway?

You can also engage the power of the onboard DAC and class D audio amplifier to make it into a handy media-player. Whack an LCD onto the expansion bus and you'll also be set (with a little code-cutting) to play videos.

What's more, unlike the Raspberry Pi, this thing is open. There is no "super secret" code or "glue" inside -- you have access to every aspect of the system's operation.

Okay, there's no HDMI output or ethernet interface -- but this board is not supposed to be a micro desktop computer -- it's a microcontroller!

Getting back to what I'm doing -- this board will be used to port and optimise the onboard software for my Sense And Avoid system. It will be doing quite a bit of signal processing (which means its hardware floating-point unit will get a thrashing) and other work.

Initially however, I'll be using some much simpler code to get familiar with the toolset and development environment -- that's where I'll be happy to share the knowledge and experiences I acquire along the way.

So, if you're perhaps already playing around with PICs or the Arduino and feel like you need a little (or a lot) more -- why not tag along for the ride?

Even if you can't even spell MCU, I'll probably do some "from scratch" tutorials that will introduce newbies to the concepts, the theory, the implementation and application of these really cool systems.

Who knows, someone who hitches a ride to this series of tutorials may end up creating something really cool and turning it into an export-earning hi-tech business.

So... let's see a show of hands please...

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