In “Kinetis Drone: Frame Construction with Graupner Race Copter Alpha 250 Q” I have assembled the frame for my Kinetis Drone. In this post I’m going to drive the ESC’s (Electronic Speed Controllers) with the Freescale FRDM-K22F board:
Graupner S3055 ESC (Source: Graupner)
FreeRTOS is probably the most popular RTOS used and I love it: it is efficient, has a lot of features, simple and easy to use. But despite its popularity, debugging it with open source tools as with Eclipse and GDB is really not that user-friendly: debugging threads/tasks is a pain compared to commercial solutions. For my university classes this semester I was looking for something easy to use by my students. Finally I managed to use a GDB helper which makes things easier now: I can switch task threads in Eclipse with GDB now 🙂
Switched to Shell Task
Every day, there is something new to learn. And having problems is always a good learning opportunity :-). Yesterday we were able to find a strange problem with our tinyK20 prototypes, just before we were about to send the design for manufacturing.
Kinetis K20 on tinyK20 Board
Many tool chains and linker are able to produce S19 files, such as with the GNU tools it is the ‘objcopy‘ which does this job (see “Binary (and S19) Files for the mbed Bootloader with Eclipse and GNU ARM Eclipse Plugins“). But these tools usually cannot handle the special cases. For example on the Freescale Kinetis K64F my serial bootloader (see “Serial Bootloader for the Freedom Board with Processor Expert“) had a problem with these lines in the S19 file:
Not aligned S19 file entries
In “How to Add Register Details View in Eclipse” I showed how to add the Register detail support in Eclipse using the EmbSysRegView plugin. This was for Luna/Mars, and for the version v0.2.4 of the plugins.
Since then, there is a new version of Eclipse (MARS, see “Going to Mars: Building a DIY Eclipse IDE for ARM Embedded Microcontrollers“) and the EmbSysRegView plugin has been updated to v2.0.5. Makes everything much simple, so here is an updated post with the details how to add register detail view to Eclipse Mars.
Eclipse Mars
Given all the posts I already have published on a similar topic, this one will be a short one: how to use the Freescale FRDM-K64F board with OpenSDAv2 to debug another board:
FRDM-K64F Board to Debug FRDM-KL25Z Board
It has been a while since I published my ‘build my own DIY IDE’ (see “DIY Free Toolchain for Kinetis: Part 1 – GNU ARM Build Tools“). I have used that approaches in my classes successfully. Now a new semester is coming up, so time to update the instructions using the latest Eclipse IDE (Mars) and tools (GCC ARM Embedded (launchpad) with GNU ARM Eclipse).
Eclipse Mars Splash Screen
In “CodeWarrior Flash Programming from a DOS Shell” I showed how to program a device from the DOS shell. Because that example was for ColdFire and CodeWarrior for MCU10.2, here is the same for a Kinetis (FRDM-KL25Z) and CodeWarrior for MCU10.6. In my workspace (c:\tmp\wsp_10.6) I have a project folder (FRDM-KL25Z).
I’m using the ‘Flash Programmer’ to sneak the needed commands:
Sneaking Commands from Flasher
I need to program several boards with a firmware: a number too small for serious batch/factory programming, but a number too high doing this with the debugger. I want this:
Need to program a few boards…
I have published a Sneak Preview how GNU gprof profiling looks for an embedded target ARM Cortex-M in an earlier post:
This tutorial explains how to profile an embedded application (no RTOS needed) on ARM Cortex-M devices with GNU gprof. Additionally I explain the inner workings to generate the data necessary for gprof.
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MCU on Eclipse 