Solar panels and electrical vehicles become more and more common in Switzerland. Ten years ago I installed solar panels. To use the available solar energy, the electrical vehicle charging box has been augmented with an open source charge controller. The controller monitors the building energy usage and adjusts the current using the Modbus connection to the charger.
We have a project imported, have built it, time to debug it on the hardware.
With “Adding RGBW Wings and Enclosure to a Debug Probe” I have a really shiny enclosure for the MCU-Link Pro Enclosure.
But I did not had enough time to replicate this for a full set of classroom hardware. The original card boxes from NXP showed already after one semester severe wear, so I have to setup something more robust: a box to store all the cables, and an enclosure to protect the PCB, for 40 units.
3D printing would take to much time, so I ended up with buying storage boxes and creating an laser-cut acrylic (PMMA) enclosure for the debug probe itself:
Dealing with and debugging distributed systems, I end up with multiple debug probes and target boards on my desk. When starting a debugging session, it can be hard to identify a debug probe by its serial number. What I do in such a situation: put a color stick on the debug probe and have it assigned a nickname.
That nickname then shows up during the debug connection, and I’m sure I connect to the right probe and board that way.
Continue readingVS Code is managing its extensions (see VS Code: MCUXpresso Extension). But to make it usable for embedded development, you need more tools: compiler, linker, debugger, libraries, build system, debug probe support, …
For the experts, this is not a big deal: you know where to get them, and you install them, as shown with another tutorial. But for a class full of students or newcomers to VS Code, this can be a a time consuming and daunting task.
To make the installation easier, NXP has released a ‘dependency checker and installer’ along with their VS Code extension, which makes the setup much easier and simpler.
Don’t worry: despite all the things going on with VS Code, Eclipse is here to stay probably for many more years. The Eclipse foundation is pumping out releases, and so does NXP with their latest MCUXpresso IDE 11.8.0. Lets have a look…
It is August 1st, and Switzerland is celebrating its National Holiday. Rather cold and rainy, so this gets me some time to catch up on things. The preparation for the coming university semester in September is in full swing, and I have the honor to take over building up a new Master of Science in Engineering education module. In the existing courses I teach on the topic of embedded systems, I do use devices and MCUs from vendors like Broadcom, NXP, STM, Nordic, Raspberry Pi and Espressif. This not only means different SDKs, but different IDEs with different debug probes.
Eclipse has been the common factor in the mix with all these, and with all the pros and cons, it worked very well. With NXP having released support for Visual Studio Code, adding an announcement, and other vendors going into the same direction, I took the decision that I want to migrate my lab and lecture infrastructure to VS Code.
Continue readingThe Freescale K20DX128 MCU was one of the first ARM Cortex-M devices of that company (now NXP) back in 2012, and the FRDM-K20D50M board was the first ‘FRDM‘ board of a long and successful series of boards, starting back in 2013. I still have the K20 present in many of my designs. The challenge with ‘early’ or ‘legacy’ devices is that after a while, they are ‘not recommended’ any more, and it is hard to get support for them. So for example in newer tooling and software from NXP, there is no support for the K20.
So if you still have the K20 around, and need some newer tooling, then I have good news for you: It is possible to add that good-old-Kinetis to the list of supported LinkServer devices, so you are not stuck and can use newer debugging solutions for the K20.
Continue readingThe combination of the NXP MCUXpresso IDE with the NXP MCU-Link Pro debug probe implements a nifty power and energy measurement tool (see New “MCU-Link Pro”: Debug Probe with Energy Measurement). The eclipse based IDE provides a dedicated view to inspect the data collected. It can export and import data, but it is in a binary format. In this article I present a way to export and then convert the data into .csv or any other format for processing or visualizing it in different ways.
Using an open source command line tool, the binary data gets converted into a csv format, which then can be consumed by many tools, e.g. gnuplot.
The MCU-Link is an inexpensive CMSIS-DAP debug probe from NXP. It can be used as a GDB server debug probe, and as such it includes scripting support. This scripting can be very useful in some cases where the MCU cannot be accessed by a normal debug session. This happens for example if students are not pay attention what binary they flash to which device, causing an MCU to potentially get ‘bricked’.
MCU on Eclipse 