2048, Embedded

Let me first get something out of the way... I am an embedded nut. I absolutely love taking a foreign piece of hardware and bringing it to life. My most recent excursion into embedded land has been with a Nucleo board designed by STMicroelectronics.

I decided to pair this board with a Gameduino 2 shield designed for the popular Arduino. I wrote a driver for the FT800 graphics processor and implemented Gabriele Cirulli's 2048 game as a first project with this hardware.

2048 Screenshot

The result is an awesome device that emulates the fun 2048 browser game (pretty closely, anyway). It will make a great desk ornament for passersby at work to gawk at.

Nucleo F4 Board

In this article I will give you a demonstration of the game and take you through some of the design concepts I have used to come up with this product. I wrote my own linker script, C-Runtime and driver library for this project and it was an awesome experience.

ARM Bare Metal Programming

Embedded systems programming has been a passion of mine for a couple of years now. I really enjoy bringing a processor online and making it dance to the beat of my drum. Over the past few days I have taken an interest in writing my own linker scripts, start code and a CRT0 (C Runtime). In this article I will give you some background as to why this is important. I will guide you through the steps that I have taken to bring an ARM processor from reset to main() and beyond.

I am using the SAM4E16E processor on a SAM4E-EK development board. I have the Atmel SAM-ICE debugging tool to facilitate loading code. The steps that I am taking in this article will be very similar for other ARM processors. I did some bare metal programming on the Raspberry Pi about a year ago and it was similar.  My development host is an up to date Linux Mint 15 system.

Debugger (front) and Evaluation Kit (back)

SAM-ICE and SAM4E-EK