Panorama picture taken from Ahrn near Leutasch in Austria/Tirol. View to the North, facing the South rim of the Wetterstein mountain range.
Wetterstein Panorama (click to enlarge)
Wetterstein Mountain Range
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Author Archives: Erich Styger
A Conference, Yellow Flowers and Green Bugs …
I’m spending a few days off in the Alps these days, if you are wondering :-). So I share a few wildflower pictures (click to enlarge) from the hiking tours today. Many trails were closed due the security measurements for the Bilderberg summit in the area, so we had to change our plans. First I thought it was for the G7 summit which is over and was on another alp in Germany. But then I realized that they did that massive thing (military forces, no-fly zone, mobile radar systems, etc) for that Bilderberg conference too. At least it did not impact us much, except using alternative routes, hikes and trails.
Golden Flower
One of 80’000: Lightning Struck over Lucerne Area
In Switzerland, Meteo Schweiz normally counts 200’000 to 500’000 lightnings every year. On June 7th 2015, the system counted over 80’000! In that evening, a heavy thunderstorm moved over most parts of Switzerland. I have not been able to take good pictures myself, but Michael Uebelhart shared that one from the Bürgenstock overlooking the Lucerne area with me:
From Bürgenstock, 2015-06-07
Eclipse Project ‘Refresh Policy’: Broken Incremental Build with External Make?
So here is a problem I have observed for a while, and several users have reported that to me: the problem is that for some reasons and only for some projects, when I do a ‘build’ in Eclipse CDT, it does a ‘full’ build. It does not only build the changed files, it builds all or many files in the project.
Building
I expect that only the changed files will be rebuild. Instead, it compiles many files it should not compile/build, with the result that a build takes a very long time. That’s clearly wrong, and not what I expect. So what is causing this problem?
Sumo Robot Competition FS2015
The Infotronic (INTRO) Spring 2015 course finished at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts with a Sumo Robot competition with great and funny robots:
Set of Sumo Robots
Preparing for Austin/TX – with no Rudy’s Sauce
YES! I’m going to attend the Freescale Technology Forum conference (http://www.freescale.com/ftf) in Austin, Texas Jun 22-25 this year. Right on time, as I have run out of Rudy’s BBQ sauce (see “Smoking BBQ Baby Back Ribs – Swiss Style“): I will need to travel light so I have enough space and weight room for bringing back BBQ sauce :-). But ‘no sauce’ does not mean ‘no BBQ‘!!!!
Smoking BBQ
Code Coverage with gcov, launchpad tools and Eclipse Kinetis Design Studio V3.0.0
What makes Eclipse great: using open source tools there are a lot of tools and techniques available which usually are only provided for desktop development.
A while back I described how to do code coverage with Eclipse Kepler and the GNU ARM Embedded (launchpad) tools (see “Code Coverage for Embedded Target with Eclipse, gcc and gcov“). With Kinetis Design Studio out, time to do the same with that Eclipse distribution, especially as Freescale is now using the stock GNU ARM Embedded tools too.
Coverage with multiple Files
Problem: undefined reference to ‘__end__’ if using Semihosting
In case you are running into the following GNU linker error about a missing __end__:
'Building target: MyProject.elf' 'Invoking: Cross ARM C++ Linker' ... toolchain/bin/../lib/gcc/arm-none-eabi/4.8.4/../../../../arm-none-eabi/lib/armv6-m/rdimon-crt0.o: In function `_start': (.text+0xdc): undefined reference to `__end__' collect2.exe: error: ld returned 1 exit status make: *** [MyProject.elf] Error 1
Failed link because missing __end__
The GNU linker complains that rdimon-crt0.o needs the symbol __end__. This symbol marks the end of the user data/RAM section, and is needed by the rdimon library specs which is used with semihosting.
Merging NXP LPCXpresso IDE with Freescale Kinetis Design Studio, Processor Expert and Kinetis SDK
So NXP announced here a $40 Billion Merger with Freescale. Frequent readers of my blog will know that I’m using in my own and university projects many Freescale devices with Eclipse based tools (Eclipse Kepler/Luna, Emprog ThunderBench, Atollic TrueSTUDIO, Freescale CodeWarrior and of Freescale Kinetis Design Studio) in combination with Processor Expert. In a few projects I have used NXP devices with the CodeRed Eclipse base tools too. So I was curious how that merger of the two silicon companies could look like, if you merge the Freescale and NXP Eclipse based tools, and mix it with Processor Expert and the Freescale Kinetis SDK? The result looks like this:
LPCXpresso v7.7.2 with Processor Expert and Kinetis SDK
Semihosting for Kinetis Design Studio V3.0.0 and GNU ARM Embedded (launchpad)
Freescale has released the v3.0.0 version of the Kinetis Design Studio: this one comes with a great positive change: instead of a custom toolchain, it is coming with the standard GNU ARM Embedded (launchpad) toolchain from ARM. Beside of better code density and less RAM needed, there is one change which affects semihosting. Previously, semihosting was enabled by default in the V2.0.0 libraries. Now semihosting needs to be turned on. This post is how to do this.
Semihosting Console with Output in Eclipse
MCU on Eclipse 