One of the nice things of modern IDE’s are: they offer many extras for free. Many times it is related to programming and coding. But I love as well the ones which makes things easier and better which is not directly related to the executed code. One thing Eclipse offers is an on-the-fly spell-checking, similar to Microsoft Word:
Spellchecked Sources
Hovering over the text offers me to correct the flagged error:
Initialization vs. Initialisation
But wait: is that example not spelled correctly?
CodeWarrior for MCU10.3 comes with the ARM GNU 4.6.2 installed:
gcc 4_6_2 in MCU10.3 layout
What about switching to a different (newer) gcc?
Processor Expert in Eclipse and CodeWarrior is cool thing, and acts as the ‘expert’ for anything around the microcontroller used. But by default, it is acting in the ‘Basic’ level only.
Component Inspector Levels
But there are ways to get it to the Expert level :-).
Debugging is usually a ‘stop-inspect-continue’ process. That does not work very well for watching a system which continuously changes its state. For this usually I toggle an LED, or write things to the console to watch with a human eye what is going on. But there is something very powerful in the CodeWarrior debugger too: to display variables and memory content while the target is running.
Variable Live View
And here it is again: a Hard Fault exception raised by the ARM Cortex-M0+ on my Freedom board:
Hard Fault in Debug View
A reason for hard faults are for example dereferencing a NULL pointer. The issue with the ARM Cortex hard fault exception stack is: it is not easy to find out where in the code the problem is.I have created a Processor Expert component to help me to find the location of such an exception. With the Eclipse based CodeWarrior for MCU10.3 there is another way: Trace with the MTB (Micro Trace Buffer)!
Eclipse based CodeWarrior for MCU10.3 comes with gcc build tools for Kinetis/ARM cores. While it features the parallel build make, I noticed that especially for larger projects build times are not as fast as it should be. The good news is: I was able to cut down my build time to less than half with a simple change :-).
When I looked at the output folder where all the object and make files are stored by Eclipse, I noticed that it has as well the listing files generated:
Listing Files in output folder
When I have asked by a student last year if I’m uing Git, I said “Git what?”. Yep, a shame I did not know what Git was a this time. But it is never to late to learn new things.
I was coming from CVS, moved to the successor of it (SVN) and was happy with it. Especially with having a local SVN server and repository, that was (and still is) a great thing. But to truely collaborate with a worldwide community, it is time to use something different: Git.
GitHub Bootcamp: 4 simple steps to git
Question: What makes 8 times ‘beep’, but I cannot hear it?
Answer: My ultrasonic range finder 🙂
FRDM-KL25Z with HC-SR04
What I have added to my FRDM-KL25Z board is an ultrasonic distance sensor, measuring distances up to 4 meters.
Christmas and New Year time is great: Gifts and time to work on my home projects. But this post is not about one gift I have organized for myself: a Raspberry Pi ;-)). No, this post is about a gift I have received from Freescale: a *new* Freedom board, the FRDM-KL05Z :-).
FRDM-KL05Z Board and Box
I have successfully used CodeWarrior for MCU10.3 beta version for many projects. With the advent of the final CodeWarrior for MCU10.3, I want to migrate my existing projects to the new and final version. First: my existing projects work as well in the final version, which is good news. But there are two things to change to take advantage of the final 10.3:
MCU on Eclipse 