Dangling pointers and memory corruption problems are nasty issues for any developer, and usually hard to find and locate in the code. Luckily Google has developed an open source tool to solve such issues: the Address Sanitizer (ASAN). The tool is available for x86 and other desktop style architectures, including Android and Linux. This article describes how ASAN can be used for an embedded target, e.g. ARM Cortex-M4 or similar.
Managed linker scripts are great on one side: the simplify the otherwise complex GNU linker script handling. On the other side it requires knowledge how to tweak them in case ‘non-standard’ behavior is needed.
One major concern of embedded system development is performance. Microcontroller have more MHz than in the past, but embedded applications are all about timing and real-time aspects.
The challenge is: how to get data off the target in realtime? SWO can help with this….
Continue readingFor a research project we selected the NXP LPC55S16 but because it has due the silicon shortage it is not available probably for the next 52 weeks (yikes!) we can use the EVK Board.
The FatFS file system from Elm Chan is the de-facto file system for many embedded systems. As such it comes integrated with silicon vendor SDKs like the NXP MCUXpresso SDK. The problem is that the SDK only has examples for things on the board, and because that board does not have a SD card socket, no example for using FatFS with an SDK card is provided :-(. So I had to create one, and you can get it from GitHub.
Continue readingThere are many ways to organize projects and workflows, and I would say Eclipse is flexible enough for everything. As I have been asked recently how I organize my projects, I’ll share it here.
As time flies by, my projects are evolving. My lab projects get used over multiple semesters, and the MCUXpresso projects by default use the SDK version used at that time.
This is great because I do want to have control over what SDK is used. But from time to time it makes sense to upgrade a project to a newer version. In this post I’ll show how an existing project can be upgraded to use a new SDK.
Continue readingSometime I’m pretty sure I wrote about a topic I can find or refer to, and I was pretty sure I did write about ‘attaching to a running target’ using MCUXpresso IDE in an article, but Google does not find it? The only rational outcome is that I can blame Google and I have to come up with a potential duplicate ;-).
Anyway: attaching to a running target is such an essential life saver it deserves a dedicated article.
Using Post-Build feature in Eclipse is a great way to augment a build with all kind of actions. What if the build takes a long time and you want to get notified? One way is to play a sound at the end of the build process.
NXP has released an updated version of the Eclipse based MCUXpresso IDE: the V11.3.1 is an update of the v11.3.0 I wrote about it back in January this year.
The release includes new device support, and beside of bug fixes includes a few new things.
Continue readingThe NXP MCUXpresso IDE has a nice context menu for executing different actions on a binary in the Eclipse Project Explorer View:
What it makes it even nicer: I can configure and use it to do anything I like. For example I can convert files and copy it in one action.
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MCU on Eclipse 