Going with the factory default can be fine. But an upgrade could give a performance boost plus added functionality. Many of the NXP i.MX RT evaluation boards have an LPC4322 based debug circuit on it. One example for this is the i.MX RT1010 board.
On such boards, one of the first steps I do is: upgrading the firmware and change it to a better option: improved speed, SWO support plus avoiding issues with the USB MSD device.
Continue readingWith “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:
Mostly unnoticed (at least for myself), SEGGER has enabled some of the J-Link debug probes to support the CMSIS-DAP debug protocol.
This greatly enhances the use of J-Link debug probes for CMSIS-DAP based tools.
Continue readingOne essential part of embedded development is the ability to debug the target application. The good thing with the Raspberry Pi Pico RP2040 Eco-system is: One can use another RP2040 Pico board as a debug probe to debug other ARM Cortex-M devices.
But instead using a Raspberry Pi Pico board with some wires, why not building a dedicated board? The result is a small, versatile and open source debugging probe which virtually can debug any ARM Cortex-M device as a standard ARM CMSIS-DAP probe:
If doing embedded development, then the debugging solution is probably the most important single tool in the development chain. Because very debugging probe has its pros and cons, I usually have at least three different debug probes on my desk, simply to get the job done in all aspects.
What is true for the hardware debugging probes, is true for the gdb client and server side. I’m using mostly the P&E, SEGGER and CMSIS-DAP plugins (e.g. NXP LinkServer) and OpenOCD from the Eclipse IDE side. But there are more choices, for example pyOCD.
The ARM Cortex M architecture has many features which are underused, probably simply because engineers are not aware of it. SWO (Single Wire Output) is a single trace pin of the ARM Cortex-M CoreSight debug block. trace pin uses the ITM (Instruction Trace Macrocell) on ARM Cortex. It provides a serial output channel, at a high speed higher than the usual UART, because it is clocked at half or a quarter of the core clock frequency, depending on the core and implementation.
As such, it is an ideal high speed output channel to send text or data to the host. This is how it is usually used, but what is unknown to many: it can be used in a bidirectional way with the help of the debugger.
The topic of this article: how to redirect standard I/O like printf() or scanf() using the SWO ITM console: means both sending *and* receiving data over the SWO debug channel: that way I can use it as a kind of UART with a single pin only.
Continue readingIt is the exam and grading time at the university, and the same time I’m preparing the lectures and labs for the new semester starting mid of February. I’m always heading for using the latest and greatest tools in my labs. A few days ago, NXP released the new version of the MCUXpresso IDE, version 11.7.0. Time to check it out…
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.
After the release of the NXP MCU-Link debug probe, there have been hints in the Eclipse based MCUXpresso IDE that there must be another one coming. And indeed: another and more powerful debug probe is now available: the MCU-Link Pro. It is not only a debug probe but a power/energy measurement tool too, including an extra LPC804 mikrocontroller which can be used for all kind of things, like automation or scripting.
The previous parts were about installation, project setup and building. This one is about debugging an ARM Cortex-M Microcontroller with Visual Studio Code:
MCU on Eclipse 