Posted on January 20, 2009 at 05:18Dear ST7 enthusiast,
I joined this forum when I started my home automation project which uses ST7FLite29 and ST7FLite39 microcontrollers.
Now I can show you my first working prototypes and their supporting PC software.
I hope that you can benefit from my project, even if home automation doesn't matter to you, because their firmware sums up my posts and contains some code snippets which can help with your work.
I think that the following features may be of interest to you:
- a co-operative scheduling approach which uses software interrupts (TRAP) for context switching;
- some small, fast state machines which get activated by indirect jumps;
- a software UART (e.g. a bit-banging routine) which uses LITE TIMER 2;
- a technique to continuously tune the internal RC oscillator so that its precision (better than .5%) isn't affected by aging and thermal drift;
- a way to drive a HD 44780 LCD display with only three wires;
- a DCF77 decoder
- a routine which acquires a LM20 (or LM61) temperature sensor reading by using the ST7FLite29 8X internal op-amp
- a SCI driving routine which ''taks'' with a PC through a RS 232 link with hardware CTS/RTS handling
- a button debouncing routine and an example of how to read the state of three buttons with only an analogue input
- a way to extend ST7Lite outputs with a cheap 74HC164
- a two wires bus and protocol to talk through photo-couplers
If home automation interest you too, be informed that my µAnts are small, very cheap devices (less than 3 euro worth of electronic parts) which can build an home automation system when they are connected by a RS 485 network.
Thanks to the µAnts' protocol, an home automation system, i.e. a µAnts colony, can be expanded up to 255 devices without performance penalties, because each µAnt adds not only inputs and outputs, but also computing power.
All these informations are freely available from the Open Source project
http://sourceforge.net/projects/uants4home/
Even if STM32 is the hottest topic of STM forums, I think that there is always an opportunity to have fun with ST7 and STM8 microcontrollers! If you want to have fun with the µAnts, join the uAnts4Home project!
EtaPhi
POST SCRIPTUM: I'm not involved with STM: I had even to buy their micro-controllers when I started my project, because then there wasn't the free samples offer...
