ChibiOS Free Embedded RTOS

About lack of FSMC it will probably comes with time and new series of STM32F3. Even STM32F1 have some MCUs with this peripheral so there is just no way that ST wont include it too in new quite high performance family.

Abhishek wrote:Even I have been thinking of having an oscilloscope based on an STM32. Indeed there are designs of oscilloscopes (usually chinese, search eBay for DSONano and you'll find plenty). They're pretty advanced and come in under 150$. There's also a DSONano project hosted on google code. I hope this info may be useful for a starting point.

Those chinese "DSONano" from Ebay are just copies of theoriginal one or the v2 revision, made by Seeed Studio. It is open source and the official code is on the google code page. The hardware is STM32F103-based. The DSO Quad is another major version, with the STM32 controlling an FPGA (and up to 144MSps, according to the wiki).

I'm thinking about this project, how about integrating LCR auto-ranging & metering capability also apart from function generator logic analyser and other stuff. That would make it an indispensable tool for any hobbyist / engineer.

Anyway we need to add more drawing functions, especially rotated text and partial ellipses to the GLCD library so that we could draw an analog meter on the display! It would look really nice.

An LCR meter would make my day! Even though I prefer a "real" oscilloscope for waveform visualization.

Xamusk wrote:

Abhishek wrote:Even I have been thinking of having an oscilloscope based on an STM32. Indeed there are designs of oscilloscopes (usually chinese, search eBay for DSONano and you'll find plenty). They're pretty advanced and come in under 150$. There's also a DSONano project hosted on google code. I hope this info may be useful for a starting point.

Those chinese "DSONano" from Ebay are just copies of theoriginal one or the v2 revision, made by Seeed Studio. It is open source and the official code is on the google code page. The hardware is STM32F103-based. The DSO Quad is another major version, with the STM32 controlling an FPGA (and up to 144MSps, according to the wiki).

I'm thinking about this project, how about integrating LCR auto-ranging & metering capability also apart from function generator logic analyser and other stuff. That would make it an indispensable tool for any hobbyist / engineer.

Anyway we need to add more drawing functions, especially rotated text and partial ellipses to the GLCD library so that we could draw an analog meter on the display! It would look really nice.

An LCR meter would make my day! Even though I prefer a "real" oscilloscope for waveform visualization.

Hi Xamusk,

those devices sound interesting for me. Have you tested personally the DSONANOv2 or the Quad? I was checking the documentation (wiki page) and it seems a little bit messy (they mix future/desirable/"non-official" with actual features in the same page).

My typical usage would be in the analog domain for measuring signals from sensors and instrumentation (not more than 1KHz Bandwidth, from 0 to 5V). In the digital domain I would like to decode protocols as I2C (400KHz Clock?) and
SPI (here over 1MHz probably it would be impossible for such devices). However, I am more interested in the analog domain as I am using this for digital: http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/Ope ... ic_Sniffer , and I am really happy
with it.

Thanks in advance!

I never actually used the DSO Nano or Quad. I preferred to get some more money and buy a Rigol Oscilloscope from DealExtreme. A "real" oscilloscope is better to use, faster to tune, etc. Doesn't get as much geek points for customization but gets the job done faster.

For digital signals, I also use the Open Logic Sniffer, which gets some of my geek points back.

Xamusk wrote:I never actually used the DSO Nano or Quad. I preferred to get some more money and buy a Rigol Oscilloscope from DealExtreme. A "real" oscilloscope is better to use, faster to tune, etc. Doesn't get as much geek points for customization but gets the job done faster.

For digital signals, I also use the Open Logic Sniffer, which gets some of my geek points back.

I was checking Rigol oscilloscopes, the ratio price/features is really unbeatable. Only one important "con", the ground is tie to the ground wall (in their 50-100Mhz cheap models), it is not isolated and this could be really dangerous.

I thought a while over the oscilloscope project and felt that it's not simply a one-night or one-person effort. By the time a developer ends up scratching his head in frustration, he will strongly feel the urge to fish out a few more bucks and buy an instrument off-the-shelf: it looks more familiar, competitive price, pre-bundled software, ... the excuses are endless. I think of it in a simple manner as a (technologically) dumb user coming from a Windows background being forced to use Linux.

However it'd be great if we do the scope project with a difference: something which the commercial offerings don't have to offer (except the usual open source benefits). I don't have any idea of what it could be (Although I told one: an integrated LCR metering capability), but I'm waiting for ideas or suggestions of making it something more useful and relevant.

Were I given a chance to design [when I'm a few years into EE, really it'd be a great learning experience for me! ] the chibiScope (or whatever the project will become), I'd go in for the F4 chip, more speed, better DMA features, FSMC to attach lots of memory required to hold the samples and peripherals like USB OTG. Alternatively I could use a small F3 in conjunction with it as a cheap AFE and coprocessor to offload the main chip.

Best Regards,
Abhishek

EDIT: Just had a look at the F3 chip datasheet, too bad the 16bit SDADC is just 50ksps single channel or 16.6 ksps on multiple channels. So, what next?

If you really want to help an open source DSO, you may take a look at the Dangerous DSO, though it really doesn't have all the features of a commercial offering and seems stale since last year.

F3 discoveries are now available at farnell, I received one yesterday.

Giovanni, is porting chibios to F3 a quick job? I had a look at doing it myself but I'm not familiar with the porting process

I guess it is a case of copying in the header files from CMIS, including the correct peripheral driver version (where compatible).

I'd like to produce an I2C driver for the new peripheral, I guess I can start development on the F0, I think the i2c is also new in that.

OK, I will give up trying to get one from within ST and order from Farnell. The port should be a piece of cake from what I saw on the manual.

Giovanni

I suppose it is a piece of cake when you know what you're doing

We could do a cool demo with this board, it has gyro, accelerometer and magnetometer, I'm thinking something along the lines of threads reading each sensor, another thread performing some filtering (there are some easy to use algorithms, e.g Seb Madgwick's AHRS), then two futher threads outputting the orientation of the board to the LED compass and Serial over USB. I've already doing this on my own board with the same acc/mag chip (LSM303), interfacing the gyro should be easy.

Maybe we need a ChibiIMU project with support for lots of different sensor chips