Upgrading to a newer GNU toolchain always has its risks. That’s why I always recommend to stay on a given toolchain for production code.
But sometimes one needs to upgrade, or gets a code or project that works in one environment, but not in another. Today I have run into a problem with code read-out projection:
Well, the code read-out protection is not the root of the problem, but a good example why problems could occur.
Continue readingSolar panels and electrical vehicles become more and more common in Switzerland. Ten years ago I installed solar panels. To use the available solar energy, the electrical vehicle charging box has been augmented with an open source charge controller. The controller monitors the building energy usage and adjusts the current using the Modbus connection to the charger.
With “Adding RGBW Wings and Enclosure to a Debug Probe” I have a really shiny enclosure for the MCU-Link Pro Enclosure.
But I did not had enough time to replicate this for a full set of classroom hardware. The original card boxes from NXP showed already after one semester severe wear, so I have to setup something more robust: a box to store all the cables, and an enclosure to protect the PCB, for 40 units.
3D printing would take to much time, so I ended up with buying storage boxes and creating an laser-cut acrylic (PMMA) enclosure for the debug probe itself:
VS Code is managing its extensions (see VS Code: MCUXpresso Extension). But to make it usable for embedded development, you need more tools: compiler, linker, debugger, libraries, build system, debug probe support, …
For the experts, this is not a big deal: you know where to get them, and you install them, as shown with another tutorial. But for a class full of students or newcomers to VS Code, this can be a a time consuming and daunting task.
To make the installation easier, NXP has released a ‘dependency checker and installer’ along with their VS Code extension, which makes the setup much easier and simpler.
Don’t worry: despite all the things going on with VS Code, Eclipse is here to stay probably for many more years. The Eclipse foundation is pumping out releases, and so does NXP with their latest MCUXpresso IDE 11.8.0. Lets have a look…
The combination of the NXP MCUXpresso IDE with the NXP MCU-Link Pro debug probe implements a nifty power and energy measurement tool (see New “MCU-Link Pro”: Debug Probe with Energy Measurement). The eclipse based IDE provides a dedicated view to inspect the data collected. It can export and import data, but it is in a binary format. In this article I present a way to export and then convert the data into .csv or any other format for processing or visualizing it in different ways.
Using an open source command line tool, the binary data gets converted into a csv format, which then can be consumed by many tools, e.g. gnuplot.
If one is using a dedicated logger module like the McuLog, then you don’t have to worry or care about timestamp support. But if your application is using normal printf() calls for for logging purpose, you will face issues to adding timestamps to it. You might consider to change all prinft() calls. This might be a lot of work, or not possible in all cases if you cannot change the source code.
But there is a really cool feature of the GNU linker to solve that problem. It allows to ‘wrap’ around any symbol or function, including the ones in the standard library. That way I can add my mode to the printf() code as a wrapper, for example adding a timestamp for every call.
In the example below you can see this in action:
In this article I’ll show how you can wrap any function with custom code.
Continue readingIn many of my embedded projects I need persistent data or storage for settings. If using an SD card, then FatFS is usually my choice for the file system. But if using an external FLASH memory device, then my preferred choice is usually LittleFS: it is a little fail-safe filesystem, designed for micro-controllers, which I’m using with external flash memory devices.
In the case where there is enough MCU flash, or if there is no external FLASH device available in a design, it can use the MCU internal FLASH as storage storage too. This is the topic of this article:
Sometimes it makes sense to write everything in assembly, even these days. For example if using a tiny microcontroller. Or just if one just don’t need all the productivity of the C/C++ tools. And it is a good educational experience: getting hands-on on the lower levels.
The Project Explorer view in Eclipse shows the projects and their files. By default, some files are hidden. But I can change that, and I can hide and unhide files based on rules:
MCU on Eclipse 