LoRaWAN is getting more an more popular, both for terrestrial and increasingly with low-orbit satellite systems. The ‘Long Range’ in ‘LoRa’ makes it an ideal solution for low-power and low data rate applications. For a university research project we selected the Semtech SX1261/62 transceiver together with the NXP LPC55S16 mikrocontroller. Because the board used for that project is not available for the public (yet), I share here how you can run the LoRaWAN stack with the NXP LPC55S16-EVK.
Iām pleased to announce a new release of the McuOnEclipse components, available on SourceForge. This release includes several bug fixes, support for more devices, and updated components like FreeRTOS, MinINI, Percepio Tracealyzer and SEGGER SystemView.
SourceForge
This tutorial shows how to use and collect coverage data using the GNU gcov tool. As board and hardaware I’m using the NXP i.MX RT1064 EVK:
While this tutorial uses this specific board, things are pretty generic and should be applicable for any other board or MCU.
Continue readingUniversity exam grading are all done now and results are in the system, and it is already time to prepare for the fall semester. I always try to use the latest and greatest tools in my courses, and the NXP MCUXpresso IDE 11.4.0 just came out. So time to have a look and explore the changes and features.
I always have been fascinated by electromechanical stuff like these Flip-Dot Displays.
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.
The previous parts were about installation, project setup and building. This one is about debugging an ARM Cortex-M Microcontroller with Visual Studio Code:
If you are developing Linux or desktop applications with GNU tools, youĀ very likely are familiar with gcov: the GNU coverage tool. It collects data what parts of the code gets executed and represents that in different formats, great to check what is really used in the application code or what has been covered during multiple test runs.
Coverage Information with gcov
line never executed
GNU coverage is possible for resource constraint embedded systems too: it still needs some extra RAM and code space, but very well spent for gathering metrics and improves the firmware quality. As I wrote in “MCUXpresso IDE V11.3.0 for 2021” things are now easier to use, so here is a short tutorial how to use it.
There are many different aspects of Open Source projects: It is not only about the fact if the sources are available (‘open’). It is about the licensing terms (how permissible is it, what can I do with it), maintenance and continuous development (what has changed between releases), how and where is it delivered (Sourceforge, dedicated distribution, packaging) up to collaboration (how can I contribute or submit issues).
NXP has now published the MCUXpresso SDK on Github:
MCUXpresso SDK on GitHub
Something I was waiting for a long time.
The Eclipse CODAN (Code Analysis) plugin is part of CDT and is a powerful static analysis tool finding all kind of possible bugs and issues. Still to my surprise not many C/C++ developers take advantage of it maybe because they are not aware that it exists?
ups! Programming error detected by CODAN
In this article I show a few tips how to effectively use it, especially with the NXP MCUXpresso SDK.
MCU on Eclipse 