I’m pleased to announce a new release of the McuOnEclipse Processor Expert components, available on SourceForge.
McuOnEclipse Components: 29-Dec-2022 Release
2
Category Archives: Building
Fixing “REENT malloc succeeded” Assertion
One little nasty assertion in the GNU standard library appeared a few days ago, kind out of nowhere, reporting “REENT malloc succeeded”:
Obviously it was caused by the call to srand() which sets the ‘seed’ for the standard library (pseudo) random number generator. The assertion happens as well later for calling the rand() function.
Continue readingAdd extra Storage to the Raspberry Pi Pico with W25Q128 and LittleFS
The RP2040 Pico board comes with 2 MByte onboard FLASH memory. While this is plenty of space for many embedded applications, sometimes it needed to have more storage space. Having the ability to adding an extra SPI FLASH memory with a useful file system comes in handy in such situations. This makes the RP2040 ideal for data logger applications or otherwise store a large amount of data. In this article I’ll show you how to add an extra 16 MByte of memory to the Raspberry Pi Pico board, running FreeRTOS, a command line shell and using LittleFS as the file system.
Advent Calendar 2022
It is already December 1st, and time for a new Advent Calendar. This year the design includes birch plywood with PMMA, SK6812 RGBW LEDs running with a Raspberry Pi Pico board, building a small village.
How to make sure no Dynamic Memory is used
In many embedded applications, it is mandatory that memory allocation is static and not dynamic. Means that no calls to things like malloc() or free() shall be used in the application, because they might fail at runtime (out of memory, heap fragmentation).
But when linking with 3rd party libraries or even with the C/C++ standard libraries, how to ensure no dynamic memory is used? The problem can occur as well for C++ objects, or a simple call to printf() which internally requires some dynamic memory allocated.
Continue readingShut Down C++ Embedded Systems with Calling the global Destructors
If using C++ on an embedded target, you depend on the constructors for global objects being called by the startup code. While in many cases an embedded system won’t stop, so you don’t need to call the global C++ destructors, this is still something to consider for a proper shutdown.
MCUXpresso IDE 11.6.1
Last week I received the email notification, that NXP has released an update of the MCUXpresso IDE: the version 11.6.1. So I quickly checked it out:
Tutorial: Creating Bare-bare Embedded Projects with CMake, with Eclipse included
MCU vendors offer SDKs and configuration tools: that’s a good thing, because that way I can get started quickly and get something up and running ideally in a few minutes. But this gets you into a dependency on tools, SDK and configuration tools too: changing later from one MCU to another can be difficult and time consuming. So why not get started with a ‘bare’ project, using general available tools, just with a basic initialization (clocking, startup code, CMSIS), even with the silicon vendor provided IDE and basic support files?
In this case, I show how you easily can do this with CMake, make and Eclipse, without the (direct) need of an SDK.
Getting Started: Raspberry Pi Pico RP2040 with Eclipse and J-Link
In this time where many micro-controllers have 100+ weeks estimated delivery time, it makes sense to look at alternatives. So it is not a surprise that the Raspberry Pi RP2040 gets used more and more in projects. It is not only inexpensive, it is (at least for now) available which makes all the difference. The RP2040 is the first microcontroller from Raspberry Pi: a dual-core ARM Cortex-M0+ running up to 133 MHz, 264 KByte on-Chip RAM and up to 16 MByte external FLASH.
It is a very versatile microcontroller, with a rich eco-system and set of tools. It can be easily used with C/C++ or MicroPython, and the Raspberry Pi Pico board only costs around $5. There are plenty of tutorials out there, for example how to use the Pico board as debug probe to debug another Pico board. While this is great, there is an easy way to use any existing J-Link and Eclipse IDE too, so this is what this article is about.
Continue readingCustom ${user} with C/C++ Code Templates
The Eclipse Editor has a very cool feature named ‘Code Templates’: With such templates files are created with specific pre-filled content. For the templates, variables like ${user} for the user name can be used, see Custom C/C++ Headers with Eclipse:
