Acer Aspire 4715z CPU Upgrade

This old laptop has been my Linux workstation on my bedroom for a few months now. It still does the job I require from it - even after 6 years of service - though at times, it already slows down on certain tasks. To speed it up a bit and extend its productive life, I decided to look for a possible processor upgrade. I scoured through eBay and found a used T7700 from China priced at $16.99 including shipping, that's just PHP 772.65 at the time it's bought. The package arrived yesterday afternoon and it's time to see if it will speed up my workstation.

The package includes a thermal compound

A Great Book for Studying the STM32F1 Family of Microcontrollers

I'm bound to learn the STM32 microcontroller, in the shortest possible time, for an ongoing project. While searching for resources and references on the web, I found this book, Discovering the STM32 Microcontroller, written by Geoffrey Brown.

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~geobrown/book.pdf

The author says the book is written as a hands-on manual for learning the STM32 microcontroller. A quick browse of it shows it is so. The sample projects use actual peripherals that you may have to deal with, including the Wii Nunchuck (for demonstrating the I2C protocol).

For newcomers to the STM32 microcontroller, I think this is a great start. It saves you the time from reading all the technical details in the reference manuals and figuring out how to apply what you've just read from them on your project.

Installing Eclipse (4.4) Luna on Xubuntu 14.04

Xubuntu 14.04 (Ubuntu) still provides Eclipse 3.8 on its repositories. To install the latest release of Eclipse (4.4), the package must be downloaded from Eclipse's website, and extracted manually.

The package can be downloaded here:

http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

STM32 Flash Loader for Linux

e-Gizmo STM32 MCU Board

I've had this STM32 Board from e-Gizmo for about 2 years now and I think it's about time it gets powered up.