STM32F4xx Libraries

I wrote a tutorial before on how to setup a toolchain and build the STM32F4xx standard peripheral drivers into one convenient library, since then, a few people have asked me about the library, so to make life easier, I downloaded the latest StdPeriph/CMSIS, in addition to a few other libraries that I might need later, and shared everything in one repository, which currently has the following libraries:

Cortex-M  CMSIS      V3.20
STM32F4xx CMSIS      V1.3.0
STM32F4xx StdPeriph  V1.3.0
STM32_USB_Device     V1.1.0
STM32_USB_OTG        V2.1.0

In addition to those, the repository also includes a simple USB device library  (stm32f4xx/USB_Generic) which abstracts all the horrible details of the USB libraries into a very simple generic USB device implementation with just two Bulk endpoints...

To use this library you just pass a struct with two callback functions and the library will call those functions whenever data is received or requested, it's as simple as that, note that it's configured for OTG FS only, it could still be useful if you just want to get USB working and don't have time to go through all the examples.

Finally, repository also includes some examples, a Blinky, a USB_Generic example and some user-space code with libusb.

Building The Libraries:

To build the libraries and examples just type make in the top directory, the top Makefile will pass along all the flags and variables, here are some options you can pass on the command line:

make DEBUG=0

This will build everything with -O2 and no debugging symbols (not recommended)

make DEBUG=1 CFLAGS="-DOSC=xx"

This will build the library with debugging enabled, no optimization and using the given crystal frequency in MHz (for example -DOSC=16)

Repository:

https://github.com/iabdalkader/stm32f4xx.git

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FT231X Breakout

This is a breakout board for FTDI's latest USB-to-Serial bridge, the FT231X. This one comes in a smaller package (SSOP20) and it's cheaper than its predecessor the FT232R/L, it also offers a charging detection feature, which I'm not really interested in, but anyway see this post for more details.

I've seen a couple of good breakout boards out there, but this one has a few advantages over the others,  it has a solder jumper to switch VCCIO between 3.3V and 5.0V, a 500mA PTC fuse for over-current protection and it's pin compatible with the Arduino mini programming header.

Repo:

https://github.com/iabdalkader/ft231x-breakout.git

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Color Tracking With OpenMV

So I finally had some free time to work on OpenMV, for those of you who haven't been following this project, OpenMV is an open-source tiny machine vision module based on an STM32F4 ARM Cortex-M4 micro and an OV9650 sensor. I started this project mainly because I find the existing cameras are either too limited for their price or too expensive if they do some image processing, so one of my main goals was to make this as cheap as possible, the total cost of this module so far is around $20 for a single board, and could go as low as $15 for 500 pieces.

I wrote a simple color tracking algorithm for the camera, which I tested using an Arduino, the Arduino sends out a few commands via the serial port to the camera telling it to capture and process a frame, it then receives back the coordinates of the object and controls the servos accordingly. I was able to process around 15FPS, which is not bad given the current naive implementation. This is a video of the camera tracking a ball:

You can find the code and schematics here in a single repository, keep in mind that I'm still working on it, and I'm also considering a new revision to fix some minor issues and add an SPI flash for storage. If you have any suggestions/feedback please feel free to leave a comment. 

hg clone https://code.google.com/p/openmv-camera/

Update: I've created a new repo on github, this has the most recent version:

git clone https://github.com/iabdalkader/openmv.git

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