MCUXpresso IDE 11.5.0

Posted on January 24, 2022 by Erich Styger

I’m now in the middle of the university fall semester exam season with writing exams and grading student work, and the same time the new semester courses need to be prepared. With the global silicon and board shortage, this will be again a challenge to equip all the labs with the needed infrastructure. The good thing is that there is no shortage on software and tools side of the infrastructure: NXP released last week their new flagship Eclipse based IDE: the MCUXpresso IDE 11.5.0. Time to check it out for the upcoming lectures and classes….

Spoiler Alert: It has a new view for FreeRTOS lovers, plus new features for energy/power measurements!

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McuOnEclipse Components: 26-Dec-2021 Release

Posted on December 26, 2021 by Erich Styger

I’m pleased to announce a new release of the McuOnEclipse components, available on SourceForge. This release includes several bug fixes, support for more devices, and updated components like FreeRTOS, MinINI, Percepio Tracealyzer and SEGGER SystemView.

SourceForge

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Tutorial: GNU gcov Coverage with the NXP i.MX RT1064

Posted on September 19, 2021 by Erich Styger

This tutorial shows how to use and collect coverage data using the GNU gcov tool. As board and hardaware I’m using the NXP i.MX RT1064 EVK:

MIMXRT1064-EVK running ThreadX — MIMXRT1064-EVK

While this tutorial uses this specific board, things are pretty generic and should be applicable for any other board or MCU.

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MCUXpresso IDE 11.4.0

Posted on July 21, 2021 by Erich Styger

University exam grading are all done now and results are in the system, and it is already time to prepare for the fall semester. I always try to use the latest and greatest tools in my courses, and the NXP MCUXpresso IDE 11.4.0 just came out. So time to have a look and explore the changes and features.

Debugging with NXP MCUXpresso IDE 11.4.0

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New MCUXpresso IDE v11.3.1

Posted on April 10, 2021 by Erich Styger

NXP has released an updated version of the Eclipse based MCUXpresso IDE: the V11.3.1 is an update of the v11.3.0 I wrote about it back in January this year.

The release includes new device support, and beside of bug fixes includes a few new things.

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MCUXpresso IDE V11.3.0 for 2021

Posted on January 17, 2021 by Erich Styger

I’m in the middle of the university exam season: means writing exams and do grading. The same time the new semester is approaching too and I need to prepare the new course material. For the classes using NXP parts I’m using the Eclipse based MCUXpresso IDE, and I just received the announcement that a new version V11.3.0 is available: time to check out what is new.

MCUXpresso IDE v11.3.0 (Build 5222)

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Standalone and Command Line Programmer with MCUXpresso

Posted on December 5, 2020 by Erich Styger

The MCU-Link is a $10 CMSIS-DAP capable debug probe which works out-of-the box with the MCUXpresso Eclipse based IDE. This is great for development, but how can I programming with the push of a button or a script? The answer is no: there is an easy way to use the debug probe outside Eclipse from a shell script, and you can use that MCU-Link probe to do the job. This is especially useful as with the example below where I have to program 60 boards this week-end :-).

Programming Boards with MCU-Link using command line

Batch Programming Boards with MCU-Link

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New MCU-Link Debug Probe from NXP

Posted on November 29, 2020 by Erich Styger

The NXP MCUXpressso IDE Release V11.2.1 gave a hint about a coming new debug probe, the MCU-Link which is available now:

MCU-Link in 3D printed enclosure debugging the LPC845-BRK Board

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RTOS Trace: TraceX with Microsoft Azure RTOS (aka ThreadX)

Posted on November 21, 2020 by Erich Styger

Having visibility and insights into a running system is highly valuable or critical: not only for optimizations but as well to verify the system design and behavior. In Getting Started with Microsoft Azure RTOS (aka ThreadX) I showed how to quickly run Azure RTOS. This article is about getting trace out of an ThreadX application and show it in TraceX.

Azure RTOS TraceX

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Steps to use FreeRTOS with newlib reentrant Memory Allocation

Posted on November 15, 2020 by Erich Styger

Reentrancy is an attribute of a piece of code and basically means it can re-entered by another execution flow, for example by an interrupt or by another task or thread. This is an important concept and still a lot of code ‘in the wild’ does violate reentrancy. As a result the application crashes immediately in the best case. Worse it crashes randomly or even worse it behaves incorrectly 😦 .

Reentrancy is always a concern if using standard library functions, including printf() or malloc(). FreeRTOS offers a reentrant wrapper to the standard malloc() and free() (Memory Scheme 3)