The new flagship of FRDM boards is the FRDM-K64F board. After FTF I have explored different ways debugging the board, and received many comments and questions about it (thanks!). Freescale announced the supports with the new Eclipse based Kinetis Design Studio (KDS). But until KDS is out, how can I use the FRDM-K64F board with CodeWarrior?
Debugging FRDM-K64F Board with CodeWarrior for MCU v10.6
The mbed for FRDM-K64F firmware (http://mbed.org/handbook/Firmware-FRDM-K64F) has great potential. Unfortunately it seems that edges are still very rough: It happens very often that my FRDM-K64F board gets locked up :-(. I can see that the target CPU is constantly resetting: the red reset LED is always on:
FRDM-K64F Red Reset LED always on
Eclipse is very powerful. To the point that you can do the same thing in multiple ways. I’m always learning new things, and recently I discovered a new way how to create a new launch or debug configuration.
So far I selected the item (e.g. GDB Hardware Debugging) and used the ‘New’ Icon:
New Debug Configuration with New Icon
I’m attending the Freescale Technology Forum (FTF) in Dallas this year: As they say here: “everything is bigger in Texas”, that’s the motto of this conference ;-). The conference is packed, and I have a hard time to keep up with all the things going on. My focus is obviously everything around Eclipse and ARM microcontroller. The conference started yesterday afternoon with hands-on labs, and I was in the one were Freescale presented the new ‘Kinetis Design Studio’: a free of charge/unlimited Eclipse tool chain based on Eclipse Kepler, GCC and GDB. Freescale presented their new software library ‘Kinetis SDK’. And: There is a new Freedom board which gets handed out to the attendees: the FRDM-K64F :-).
Texas Style Glass Coverage
The current Eclipse Kepler version comes with changes for debugging variables. I have students coming from the earlier Eclipse versions, so here are a few tips for dealing with variables in Eclipse Kepler.
Variables View in Eclipse
Maybe you had this problem too: you shared a project with somebody, only to realize that your carefully crafted debug configuration was not shared?
Eclipse has the concept to store settings in the ‘framework’. The ‘framework’ is the Eclipse internal data, basically what is inside the .metadata folder of the workspace.
metadata folder in workspace
Naturally, I have several project ideas lingering around. No time to make them all (for now). One of it is interfacing the Raspberry Pi camera with a microcontroller. To store the images, I need plenty of RAM on the device, and so far the Kinetis microcontroller did not have that. Finally, Freescale announced the K64F120 a few months back, and my ordered TWR-K64F120M board arrived on my desk, waiting to be used: Finally I get an ARM Cortex-M4F with 1 MByte of FLASH and 256 KByte of RAM :-).
TWR-K64F120M Box
At conferences and shows like the Embedded World in Nürnberg it is not only about gathering the trends of the industry: it is as well about collecting all the goodies handed out to the attendees. I’m less interested in things like pens or the like: what I love most are microcontroller on a board I can use :-). This year STMicroelectronics, Atmel and Cypress all had boards to distribute ‘like candies’ 🙂
Goodies from Embedded World
As mentioned in Part 9: There is a new GNU ARM Eclipse plugin 2.1.1, and this one makes project creation for Freescale devices easier than ever 🙂
GNU ARM Eclipse 2.1.1
On Monday the new semester starts, and yet again: we will do a Sumo thing :-). They can choose which tool chain they would like to use to develop their application for the ARM Cortex-M0+ used from Freescale. One option is to create a ‘Do-It-Yourself’ toolchain. Since the start of the series, things have evolved: there is a new GNU ARM tool chain available, Segger has updated their drivers, and most important the GNU ARM Eclipse plugin has been greatly extended to support Freescale parts and Processor Expert. So instead to read through all the previous tutorials, this one is about putting together a free tool chain less than 10 minutes (not counting the time to download around 500 MByte).
DIY Eclipse Toolchain
