Embedded hardware comes with limitations, and one if it is the given number of hardware breakpoints. Depending on your MCU, 4 or only 2 hardware breakpoints are available, making debugging and stepping in read-only memory (FLASH) a challenge.
Did you know that one can have ‘unlimited’ number of breakpoints in FLASH, with the help of GDB? This is very useful for extended debugging, or if you want to use breakpoints for testing?
Continue readingSometimes it makes sense to write everything in assembly, even these days. For example if using a tiny microcontroller. Or just if one just don’t need all the productivity of the C/C++ tools. And it is a good educational experience: getting hands-on on the lower levels.
The Project Explorer view in Eclipse shows the projects and their files. By default, some files are hidden. But I can change that, and I can hide and unhide files based on rules:
GDB is the de-facto debugging engine and debug connection for micro-controllers these days: it is versatile and with its client-server architecture very flexible and powerful, and pretty much every debug probe and vendor (PEMICRO, SEGGER, OpenOCD, pyOCD, …) offers it. But a GDB server or command line implementation was not available for the NXP LinkServer family of debug probes (LPC-Link, MCU-Link, MCU-Link Pro). This has changed now: LinkServer is available as command line tool and can be used as GDB Server:
With the new LinkServer package I do not only get a gdb server implementation: I have now a command line tool I can use for automation and all kind of different things: programming boards, erasing flash, and so on.
Continue readingMostly unnoticed (at least for myself), SEGGER has enabled some of the J-Link debug probes to support the CMSIS-DAP debug protocol.
This greatly enhances the use of J-Link debug probes for CMSIS-DAP based tools.
Continue readingA Triumvirate is or Triarchy is built by three individuals which lead or rule something. In this article I want to rule a project with Eclipse CDT, Visual Studio Code and with building it from the command line for automated builds.
So what if I have an Eclipse project (say MCUXpresso IDE and SDK), and want to build it on a build server, and and I want to use the same time the project with Eclipse IDE and Visual Studio code?
Key to this is CMake: I’m keeping the Eclipse CDT features, adding CMake with Make and Ninja to the fix, and have it ‘ruled’ by three different ’emperor’: Eclipse, Visual Studio Code and from a shell console:
We all should know it: dynamic memory usage can be dangerous. There can be memory fragmentation, use-after-free, out-of-memory and memory leaks. While I do prefer static memory allocation for embedded systems, using a dynamic memory allocation in some applications is not avoidable or just makes sense.
In one of my lecture modules we develop a ‘Boulder’ game, where the player has to collect underground diamonds and avoid moving monsters:
I’ll show you have FreeRTOS memory usage can be tracked and monitored.
Continue readingOne essential part of embedded development is the ability to debug the target application. The good thing with the Raspberry Pi Pico RP2040 Eco-system is: One can use another RP2040 Pico board as a debug probe to debug other ARM Cortex-M devices.
But instead using a Raspberry Pi Pico board with some wires, why not building a dedicated board? The result is a small, versatile and open source debugging probe which virtually can debug any ARM Cortex-M device as a standard ARM CMSIS-DAP probe:
By default, the debugger cares about the initial register settings after connecting to the target. But for special cases like using a bootloader combined with a loaded application, this requires a bit more than the usually ‘standard procedure’. For example I need to set both a custom program counter (PC) and stack pointer (SP).
I love the WS2812B (aka SK6812) addressable LEDs: they are inexpensive and available in different packages. I have used them in different projects, including the MetaClockClock one. I used the NXP Kinetis for these projects, but because they are not available any more, for a new project we had to choose a new microcontroller, with the Raspberry Pi Pico RP2040 as the winner.
MCU on Eclipse 