I mentioned the hands-on sessions on FreeRTOS I do this week at NXP FTF Tech Forum in Austin in my previous post. What we are using in the session is an Eclipse plugin in Kinetis Design Studio showing all kinds of FreeRTOS information:
NXP FreeRTOS Plugin in Kinetis Design Studio
NXP FTF Tech Forum in Austin has been a blast! I’m running another FreeRTOS hands-on session (FTF-DES-N2048) this afternoon which yet again is fully booked. But we will squeeze in as many as possible from the waiting list.
One very exciting thing we are going to use is FreeRTOS thread awareness in Eclipse/Kinetis Design Studio: to see and debug the FreeRTOS threads in Eclipse using the Segger GDB and it will show the list of threads in the Debug view:
FreeRTOS Thread Awareness with Segger GDB
By default I’m programming the Elf/Dwarf (.elf) file present in the GNU ARM Eclipse debug configuration:
Elf File to be Downloaded
But how to program the board with something different from the .elf file?
The bad thing with Eclipse and GDB is: if something is failing, then all what I get is a very cryptic error message when I launch the debugger:
The system tried to join a drive to a directory on a joined drive
In “Debug Multiple Boards with GDB at the Same Time” I have used the Segger J-Link to debug multiple boards, from the same IDE, at the same time. The remaining question in that article was: how to do the same the P&E Multilink/OpenSDA?
Debugging two NXP FRDM-KL27Z Boards with P&E Debugger the same time
The world is changing, and the say is “change is good” :-). In the software and API world, change very often means that a change results into something broken. So I had battled with semihosting working on the NXP Kinetis parts, only to find out that it does not work any more with using the latest version 2.0. The semihosting output e.g. with P&E debug connection remains empty:
No Semihosting output
So how to fix this?
Related to my earlier article about using OpenOCD, I want to share something I have learned (again) with OpenOCD v0.10.0:
I was running often into the following error:
Warn : Cannot communicate... target not halted. Error: auto_probe failed Error: Connect failed. Consider setting up a gdb-attach event for the target to prepare target for GDB connect, or use 'gdb_memory_map disable'. Error: attempted 'gdb' connection rejected
OpenOCD cannot communicate
FreeRTOS is probably the number one RTOS used, and Eclipse is likely the most popular IDE I can think of. But debugging FreeRTOS applications with Eclipse and GDB is somewhat limited? What I would like to get at the minimum is this: ability to see all the different threads in the Eclipse debug view like this:
FreeRTOS Threads in Eclipse with OpenOCD
As you might guess from that screenshot: this post is about how to make FreeRTOS tread debugging possible with Eclipse and GDB :-).
It has been already two months after the Feb 2016 release, and so much things are going on, so a new release was overdue. Today I have released a new version of the McuOnEclipse components on SourceForge with the following main changes and features:
See readme on SourceForge for the full history.
McuOnEclipse 2016-04-03 Release
So here I have 50 new NXP Kinetis K22 Robot boards (see “Zumo Robot with Magnetic Encoders“), and they all need to be programmed with the first firmware on the bench:
Programming Robot Boards
The challenge is: how to do this in a fast an efficient way, without the need for an IDE or even host PC machine?
