I’m pleased to announce that a new release of the McuOnEclipse components is available on SourceForge. This release includes several smaller bug fixes and initial component support for the NXP S32 Design Studio and SDK.
SourceForge
By default, the FreeRTOS threads do not show up with the SEGGER J-Link debug connection in the Eclipse based NXP S32 Design Studio IDE. But don’t worry: Here is how to get it working with SEGGER J-Link debug connection:
FreeRTOS Threads in Eclipse Debug View
The ARM DWT (Data Watchpoint and Trace) is an optional feature of the ARM-Cortex-M, and many Cortex-M3, M4 and M7 devices have it implemented. With it comes a cycle counter which counts the cycles spent. In Cycle Counting on ARM Cortex-M with DWT I described an approach how the application on the target can access the cycle counter.
The MCUXpresso IDE shows that cycle counter in the Eclipse Registers view:
Cycle Counter in Register View
This article is about a project I have started back in January 2018. As for many of my projects, it took longer than anticipated.But now it is working, and the result is looking very good: a DIY automated pick and place machine to place parts on circuit boards. In the age of cheap PCBs, that machine closes the gap for small series of boards which have to be populated in a time consuming way otherwise.
OpenPnP Pick&Place Machine
I recently discovered a nice feature in Eclipse CDT: the ability to show the return value of a function:
Return Value shown as Variable
To support my talk next week at the Embedded Computing Conference 2018, I have put together a video with the hardware features of that Pick&Place based on OpenPnP machine based on NXP LPC1769 and NXP Kinetis K22. Below is a picture of the current machine:
Pick & Place Machine
Summer finally arrived, and the alpine meadows are blooming. Enjoy a collection of flowers (click to enlarge)….
Knabenkraut
Is BLACK the color of the season? My students really seem to love these ‘dark’ Eclipse themes. Well, I tried ‘dark’ themes in the past, but I have not been vey excited about it. Somehow I preferred more the ‘black on white background’ thing. But: I have now managed to install the ‘Darkest Dark’ Eclipse theme into the NXP MCUXpresso 10.2 IDE for my daily work, and I feel it hurts my eyes less? Maybe I’m getting older? Or could it really be that ‘dark’ look and feel?
Darkest Dark Theme with MCUXpresso IDE
Find out for yourself in the following article….
By default, the GNU compiler (gcc) optimizes each compilation unit (source file) separately. This is effective, but misses the opportunity to optimize across compilation units. Here is where the Link Time Optimization (LTO, option -flto) can help out: with a global view it can optimize one step further.
The other positive side effect is that the linker can flag possible issues like the one below which are not visible to the compiler alone:
type of '__SP_INIT' does not match original declaration [enabled by default]
Warning by LTO
Hardware Timers are essential to most embedded applications: I use them mostly for triggering actions at a given frequency, such as acquiring data from a sensor. With using an RTOS I can do a similar thing using a task: the task will run with a given frequency and I can periodic work in it. However, using a task might be too much overhead doing this. The good news is that there is a much more efficient way to do this in FreeRTOS with Software Timers. And this is what this tutorial is about: how to use Software Timers with FreeRTOS.
FreeRTOS Software Timers
MCU on Eclipse 