Arduino Nano is a pretty cheap single-board microcontroller kit. It’s very useful for a tasks like generating specific signal, programming EEPROM, etc. For example Ben Eater uses it to program EEPROM. If you want to build a great device from scratch I still recommend you STM32 but if you want to solve some problem very quickly (and perhaps dirty), you can use AVR microcontroller inside the Arduino Nano. In this article I’ll show you how to program Arduino Nano on Ubuntu to drive 74HC595 shift register.

In my last post I’ve described long way of configuring non-proprietary toolchain for ARM programming. I was pretty satisfied with it except two of its elements: Eclipse (I’m not a fan of large IDEs) and proprietary STM32 L1 standard peripheral library. The post have also covered cherry-picking of needed files from this libray to transform STM32 F1 blinking “hello world” to STM32 L1 blinking project. Today I’ve found much faster way to start STM32 L1 programming.

ARM microctrollers (MCUs) are cheaper and more powerful than popular Atmel AVR MCUs (source, Russian). I’m familiar with AVR architecture and I have small experience of work with ATMega, but I want to study usage of ARM MCUs in real applications. If you have some experience in programming and working with some electronics this article may help you to start studying ARM platform.