The Voloci electric motorbike was made and sold by Nova Cruz Products Inc. during the period 2001-2003. It was too far ahead of its time and production soon ceased, but there are quite a lot of them out there. Unfortunately, the firmware had a bug and could get corrupted and a lot of these bikes did not get the very last update that fixed this. Kanda have just been working with one such guy to help him resurrect his machine.
Resurrecting Voloci Electric Motorbike
May 10th, 2013Firmware Updates in the Field
April 26th, 2013All microcontroller based applications include the microcontroller code called firmware but it is surprising how many people forget that they may need to update it when their products are scattered at customer locations. This may be because (heaven forbid) that they discover a bug in the system that needs to be corrected or, more commonly, that the product needs new features in response to customer feedback or competitor’s actions. So how do we simplify firmware updates?
Program in C or Assembler?
January 18th, 2013A common question we get is should I program my microcontroller in C or assembler? This usually means do I bother with assembler or just use C. Sometimes it just means that I do not know the difference. So what is the difference?
What is AVR microcontroller?
December 20th, 2012An AVR microcontroller is a type of microcontroller manufactured by Atmel, which has particular benefits over other common microcontrollers, but first what is a microcontroller?
The easiest way of thinking about it is to compare a microcontroller with your PC, which has a motherboard in it. On that motherboard is a microprocessor (Intel, AMD chips) that provides the intelligence, RAM and EEPROM memories and interfaces to rest of system, like serial ports (mostly USB ports now), disk drives and display interfaces. A microcontroller has all or most of these features built-in to a single chip, so it doesn’t need a motherboard and many components, LEDs for example, can be connected directly to the AVR microcontroller. If you tried this with a microprocessor, bang!
All About CAN Bus
November 20th, 2012What is CAN bus? Officially, CAN is a Controller Area Network, which is a network of independent controllers communicating securely. It was first developed by Bosch and Intel in 1990 and has been amended since. The International Standards Organisation (ISO) has further defined CAN using their OSI model.
Smart Cards and Smart Card Programmer
November 16th, 2012Smart Cards are a bit of a misunderstood subject and no-one is quite sure what they are. Smart Cards are defined in a standard called ISO 7816. This has different sections that cover physical size and characteristics, where the contacts should be (for contact cards) and how to communicate with them.
Programming AVR Bootloader Code
October 4th, 2012We have been asked about how you can program an application code file and a separate bootloader into an AVR microcontroller using a Kanda programmer. It isn’t possible to program two separate files but it is simple enough to combine them into one file.
Help, Production Programmer Needed
September 7th, 2012How do you choose a new production programmer? This issue came up in our production department this week, and made us consider again what is important in a production programming system.
So what considerations are important when choosing a new programming system?
Firstly, where possible we use ISP (In System Programming) and all our own products are manufactured using ISP but that is not always possible and ISP will be discussed further in another post. We also carry out contract manufacturing and assembly, and this is where we needed a new socket programming solution.
Continue reading “Help, Production Programmer Needed” »
Cookie Law, another EU Classic
July 27th, 2012Just when you thought you had complied with all the EU legislation needed for your electronics business, they dump another one on us and what a beauty!
This regulation, 2009/136/EC requires all websites that use cookies to inform the user and to obtain their consent before placing any cookie on the user’s PC.
What does this mean in practice?
Why Use AVR Dragon?
July 26th, 2012AVR Dragon is a low cost In System Programmer (ISP) and also an In Circuit Emulator (ICE) in one package. It operates from Atmel AVR Studio development environment and is great for code development.
What can it do?
AVR Dragon
