GoKawiil
Tech News
A hardware blogger has published a long-delayed write-up on experimenting with the STM32MP2, discussing prior work combining STM32 microcontrollers with FPGAs and the routing challenges of the STM32H7's FMC bus on low-cost boards. The post also references a silicon security bug the author discovered in an ST chip, which was disclosed only after ST issued an advisory.
Oxide has released sp-emu, an open-source tool that emulates Cortex-M7 and Cortex-M33 microcontrollers on illumos and Linux (x86 and ARM), replacing an earlier simulation-only stub called SpSim. The emulated devices run Oxide's Hubris firmware directly and communicate over sockets with the Management Gateway Service and Inter-Processor Communication Channel, allowing the company's Voxel virtual lab to interact with them as if they were real service processors. A key engineering challenge was replicating time: since Hubris schedules work off a 1ms SysTick and the emulator has no wall clock, the team built a custom clock that counts instructions rather than real time.
A developer reprogrammed the firmware of IK Multimedia's iRig HD X USB audio interface to run NAM A2-Lite, a compact neural amp-modeling engine, directly on the device's built-in 500 MHz NXP Cortex-M7 processor. Instead of streaming guitar audio to a computer or phone for amp simulation, the interface now processes a 5150-with-OD808 amp model in real time internally, fitting the engine into 128 KiB of FlexRAM and measuring performance close to the original NAMCore software.