The Rust programming language is making its way into the embedded world, and getting more and more popular and not only at the Lucerne University. With Rust, the probe-rs is one of the popular debug choices, as it nicely comes with cargo. On the hardware side, the NXP MCU-Link is $15 debug probe hardware I use for many targets. Why not using the MCU-Link with probe-rs and Rust?
Who needs a debug probe, if you have printf()? If doing serious development, you most likely want a hardware debug probe. We at the HSLU IET use different hardware, boards and kits, and for many of the classroom equipment it is very useful to have the debug probe embedded on the target board: less cables, easier to use. For this we have developed a new Open Source Hardware (OSHW) debug probe in KiCad which can used in different ways: as external debug probe, integrated and soldered on top of the target board, or fully integrated and embedded into a custom design.
Maybe you are using a multi-core device in your projects, but have not tapped into multi-core usage yet? FreeRTOS V11.0 is out, and the big news is that it has finally Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) integrated into the mainline. This greatly simplifies FreeRTOS usage, as I finally can use the same RTOS for my SMP targets and boards, and I can easily switch between single-core and multi-core applications.
The MCU-Link is a small and inexpensive $10 CMSIS-DAP debug probe from NXP. It can work with OpenOCD, but has better target support using the NXP LinkServer which implements a gdb server. This makes it an ideal combination for scripting or automated testing.
An important part of every CI/CD pipeline is having a testing phase. In this article I show how to use GNU gcov (coverage) with an embedded target, using Visual Studio Code as front end:
With this, I can run the code on the embedded target which stores the coverage data on the host.
Continue readingGoing with the factory default can be fine. But an upgrade could give a performance boost plus added functionality. Many of the NXP i.MX RT evaluation boards have an LPC4322 based debug circuit on it. One example for this is the i.MX RT1010 board.
On such boards, one of the first steps I do is: upgrading the firmware and change it to a better option: improved speed, SWO support plus avoiding issues with the USB MSD device.
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MCU on Eclipse 