MCU on Eclipse

On a lifelong learning journey …

Contributing an IoT LoRaWAN Raspberry Pi RAK831 Gateway to The Things Network

Posted on February 25, 2019 by Erich Styger

LoRa and LoRaWAN is getting the de-facto wireless IoT network in my area. No surprise that traditional telecom providers like Swisscom trying to monetize the ‘Internet of Things’ area. Luckily there is an open and free alternative: https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/. Volunteers, enthusiasts and members in the different TTN communities build gateways and offer free LoRaWAN network access. I wanted to contribute to that grassroots movement with building my gateway, providing LoRaWAN access to my neighborhood.

LoRaWAN TheThingsNetwork Gateway

Continue reading →

MCUXpresso IDE V10.3.1 available

Posted on February 24, 2019 by Erich Styger

On Friday a new release of the Eclipse Oxygen based NXP MCUXpresso IDE V10.3.1 has been made available. The IDE supports MacOS, Linux and Windows 32/64-bit and will be 64-bit only going forward.

MCUXpresso 10.3.1 About Information

Continue reading →

Different Ways of Software Configuration

Posted on February 23, 2019 by Erich Styger

Most of the time software needs some way to configure things: depending on the settings, the software will do different things. For example the software running on the microcontroller on top of the Raspberry might have the OLED LCD available or not:

Raspberry Pi and tinyK22 (NXP Kinetis K22FN512) with OLED LCD

How can I deal with this in my application code? Continue reading →

Debugging the Startup Code with Eclipse and GDB

Posted on February 17, 2019 by Erich Styger

By default, when debugging an embedded application, the target usually stops at main():

stopped in main

That’s usually fine, but what if I want to debug the code out of reset?

Continue reading →

Tutorial: Changing ARM Cortex Core or Microcontroller in Eclipse CDT Projects

Posted on February 9, 2019 by Erich Styger

Sometimes I start a project with an ARM microcontroller, and in the middle of the project I find out that it was a wrong choice at the beginning and I need to switch the microcontroller derivative or even the used ARM core. With little knowledge of the project structure and the files needed, such a switch is not the easiest thing, but definitely possible.

switching cores

Continue reading →

Tutorial: Blinky with the NXP LPC845-BRK Board

Posted on February 3, 2019 by Erich Styger

The NXP LPC845-BRK board is a sub-$6 breadboard friendly development board with an ARM Cortex-M0+ on it. This tutorial is about developing a ‘blinky’ on it using MCUXpresso.

Binky on NXP LPC845-BRK Board

Continue reading →

Tutorial: Transforming the NXP LPC845-BRK into a CMSIS-DAP Debug Probe

Posted on February 2, 2019 by Erich Styger

The NXP LPC845-BRK board is a tiny an inexpensive (sub $6) breakout board. The board includes a CMSIS-DAP (LPC11U35) on-board debug probe which can be used as a debug probe to debug any NXP LPC, Kinetis or i.MX RT device 🙂

LPC845-BRK used to debug a Sumo Battle Robot

Continue reading →

Tutorial: Using external Debug Probes with NXP LPC845-BRK Board

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Erich Styger

One great thing with that new NXP LPC845-BRK board is that it is possible to use it with any standard SWD/JTAG debugger, as it has the 10pin debug header present on the board. It is not populated by default, because the LPC845-BRK includes a CMSIS-DAP debug probe already. But if I want to use a SEGGER J-Link, a P&E Multilink or the NXP LPCLink2, this is certainly something to consider:

Debugging LPC845-BRK with LPC-Link2

Continue reading →