Category Archives: Debugging

MCU10.2 Update 1.0.0 released

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The update 1.0.0 for the MCU10.2 release has been published on the Freescale CW MCU V10.2 Updates & Patches web site. Downloading the 500 MByte zip file and installing the update will take a while. After downloading I select Help > Install New Software … and specify the archive file.

Note: In general uninstalling an eclipse update is not possible. If you want to keep our original MCU10.2 on the side, then follow this trick: Copy your existing MCU10.2 installation folder and rename it (say to ‘MCU10.2_without_update’). Then apply the update to the normal MCU10.2. If you want to revert to the version without the update, simple delete the updated installation and rename the one without the update again. No need to reinstall things again. And you can use both the updated version and the normal version in parallel too: simply launch the eclipse\cwide you want 🙂

Time to read the release notes and dig into what has been changed and improved.

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Scripting: The Debugger Shell, Getting started…

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(This is the first in an occasional series around the scripting in eclipse and CodeWarrior. Post a comment – let me know what you think!)

Writing code should be fun, and debugging it is just a necessity because I rarely get it right the first time. Eclipse with its GUI is a great thing, and so is a command line interface. Luckily the CodeWarrior eclipse engineers have added that kind of tool for the CodeWarrior debugger: the Debugger Shell as command line debugger using the TCL scripting language. This gives me a powerful way to deal with the embedded target board: from basic access to memory, to stepping and controlling the execution up to programming the flash memory.

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Offline Registers

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The eclipse based CodeWarrior for MCU10.2 comes with many unique extensions of the eclipse platform, implemented by Freescale. One of these featured mentioned in my post is the ability to inspect the registers in an offline mode: The Offline Register view. How is this different from the Registers view?

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Problem Occurred: Flash programming with overlapping memory

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My post in “An error occurred…”: Applied Debugging Rules gives some hints about how to isolate and solve some debugging problems. But here is a case where the tips did not help: I had this dialog with “Failed to resume target process” for my HCS08 project again:

Problem occurred
Problem occurred

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Tracing with FreeRTOS+Trace from Percepio

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As shown in Tracing FreeRTOS with a Hardware Probe: I have a nice hardware probe to trace out events from my application. But what about to use the target memory as trace buffer? New devices have much more on-chip memory, so this could be an attractive option. That was on my list of future extensions, but then the news came in: Percepio announced their collaboration with FreeRTOS+Trace: exactly what I needed!

It is using the same concept as the FreeRTOS Trace Probe: the trace hooks provided by the FreeRTOS API. But instead streaming it off the target as with the FreeRTOS Trace probe, it is using a RAM buffer on the device. The real cool thing is: the Percepio trace viewer is very, very nice!

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Tracing FreeRTOS with a Hardware Probe

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Using an RTOS is an excellent thing: it provides services and allows to scale my application. But it adds complexity. With many tasks, queues and semaphores it is hard to have an overview what is going on. To get visibility, Martin Bucher has developed in a bachelor diploma work the FreeRTOS Trace Probe. Continue reading →

Dissection of MCU10 Projects

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Creating an eclipse managed make project with MCU10 is easy: Starting the wizard with File > New > Bareboard Project and after a few clicks I have a project. I don’t need to worry about all the files in the project structure, until……..well, until I need to put the files into a VCS.

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Men In Black are back! Flashing and FX’ing…

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I have mentioned in MCU10.2 released a new feature in CodeWarrior: support for the USB Universal Multilink FX from P&E Microcomputer Systems. Two Multilink FX arrived last week at the University, and finally I had my hands around it. The first thing which came to my mind when I saw the picture of the device on the P&E website: the black boxes are back!

Can I hope for a “Special FX Edition” in that box with cool sunglasses and a flash stick to erase and reprogram FLASH memory of microcontrollers? That would definitely make the flash erasing and programming easy and fast, as in the movie. 🙂
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