Clock projects are cool. LED projects are cool too. And if it moves, the better. So why not building a moving pixel LED mechatronics clock? A matrix with addressable RGB LEDs, each can change color and is moved by a tiny stepper motor, to let pixels stand out?
The new year 2024 is coming, so time to close the current year with a new release: I’m pleased to announce a new release of the Processor Expert components, available on SourceForge and GitHub.
One key element of a CI/CD pipeline is the automatic testing phase: whenever I check in new source code or manually trigger it, I can run a test suite to make sure that the changes do not break anything. For this, I have to run automated tests. For an an embedded target, it means that I have to run some tests on the board itself too.
I’m getting my head more and more around CMake and its features. After having so many issues with VS Code dealing with CMake Kits, I have found feature in CMake which really is a game changer for me: CMake Presets.
An important part of every CI/CD pipeline is having a testing phase. In this article I show how to use GNU gcov (coverage) with an embedded target, using Visual Studio Code as front end:
With this, I can run the code on the embedded target which stores the coverage data on the host.
Continue readingOne important thing in using VS Code and CMake projects is that one needs to have a CMake kit assigned to the project. But after a restart of VS Code or if I re-load a project, VS Code has lost the previously assigned CMake kit:
This is very annoying, but luckily I have found a fix for this.
Continue readingI’m working recently on a new lecture module using the Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040) board, which highlights several aspects of modern software engineering, including DevOps and CI/CD. An important part of any CI/CD pipeline is testing. For a host application, one could pass arguments to the application, e.g. ‘myapp --test=module1‘, or let it read such information from a configuration file which describes the tests. Or write GNU gcov data to a file to collect coverage information.
Unfortunately, a normal embedded application has no argv[], and many system have no file system. A solution to this problem would be using semihosting with file I/O. Unfortunately for the Raspberry Pi Pico SDK 1.5.1 for the RP2040, there is no semihosting file I/O implemented :-(.
I have now implemented and added file I/O to the SDK, making it possible for the RP2040 to access and use files on the host, among other things. This greatly extends the capabilities of the device, and is very useful for testing, including gathering test coverage information.
In the OOP world, global objects get initialized with a constructor and destroyed at the end with a destructor. Interestingly, the GNU gcc has attributes to mark functions as constructor and destructors, which can greatly simply system startup and shutdown, even if not using C++.
With the GNU gcc compiler, I can mark functions with an attribute, so they get called before entering main() or after exit of main(). The attribute works both in C and C++, but it especially useful in C to initialize modules in an automated way.
Continue reading“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
Agile Manifesto, https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
through early and continuous delivery
of valuable software.”
It is interesting to see that modern tools and agile development workflows are getting more and more into the embedded world. CI/CD is a strategy where code changes to an application get automatically integrated, tested and released automatically into a production environment.
In my previous article I showed how to import, build and debug MCUXpresso SDK projects in VS Code. In my lectures and labs we are using a robot based on the NXP Kinetis K22FX512 ARM Cortex-M4F microcontroller, and there is only the v2.13.0 SDK available.
The software on the robot uses the latest NXP MCUXpresso SDK v2.3.1. The he Eclipse based MCUXpresso IDE 11.8.0 works fine with all the 2.x SDKs, up to the latest 2.13.0 one.
Continue reading
MCU on Eclipse 