A lot of good things happened in the last three weeks, so here is a new updated McuOnEclipse component release, with the following main improvements:
First off: The tinyK20 project is progressing fine and is now on Hackaday.io :-).
For a research project we would like to use the tinyK20 to log gyro sensor data. For this I have created a quick-n-dirty project to explore how feasible it is. The tinyK20 has all the pins on the outside of the board, so I’m able to put it on a bread board:
tinyK20 on Breadboard
One of the most important aspects for developing complex realtime applications is get insights into what is going on the target. Segger just has released a free tool which gives an incredible useful insight view and visualization:
Segger System View for FreeRTOS
On SourceForge I have published an update of the McuOnEclipse software components, with following major changes:
McuOnEclipse SourceForge Release 2015-10-17
Mastering interrupts is critical to make an embedded application reentrant. The challenge with reentrancy is that things might be implemented in a wrong way and the issue might just show up sporadically (see “EnterCritical() and ExitCritical(): Why Things are Failing Badly“). The ARM Cortex interrupt controller is named NVIC (Nested Vectored Interrupt Controller).
ARM Cortex NVIC Registers
It is possible to use the Freescale FRDM-KL43Z to debug another board (see “Using the Freescale Freedom (FRDM-KL43Z) to Debug other Boards“). The FRDM-KL43Z has an on-board debug probe integrated, the OpenSDA. But it is easily possible to debug the board directly with a SWD debug probe like the P&E Universal Multilink or the Segger J-Link.
Debugging the FRDM-KL43Z with SWD
I don’t own a Mac computer, and I try to keep my tutorials as multi-host-platform as possible. So it is always cool to see if someone else posts a nice tutorial on a different host machine: For all Mac (and as well non Mac) users, have a look at this tutorial Nash Reilly has posted: “An Introduction to Freescale’s Kinetis Design Studio.”
It nicely explains downloading and installing KDS with the Kinetis SDK and then run a ‘hello world’ program on the hardware.
And very worthwhile to check out Nash’s other articles here too: http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/author/nash-reilly
Happy Nashing 🙂
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
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
