For systematic debugging, an engineer needs a debug probe. For the Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040) device there are plenty of debug options with VS Code.
In this article I show different options, from professional tools to DIY solutions and the settings in VS Code I’m using.
Continue readingWith semihosting I can use standard I/O function like printf() and I can read and write data on the host through the debug connection. If used with care, this is a great feature especially for unit testing.
In the OOP world, global objects get initialized with a constructor and destroyed at the end with a destructor. Interestingly, the GNU gcc has attributes to mark functions as constructor and destructors, which can greatly simply system startup and shutdown, even if not using C++.
With the GNU gcc compiler, I can mark functions with an attribute, so they get called before entering main() or after exit of main(). The attribute works both in C and C++, but it especially useful in C to initialize modules in an automated way.
Continue reading“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
Agile Manifesto, https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
through early and continuous delivery
of valuable software.”
It is interesting to see that modern tools and agile development workflows are getting more and more into the embedded world. CI/CD is a strategy where code changes to an application get automatically integrated, tested and released automatically into a production environment.
Developing for an embedded target means using a certain version of GNU compiler, debugger and other tools. The challenge gets bigger if working with multiple different tool chains and environments.
Conda is package, dependency and environment management tool. While it is heavily used for Python and Data Science development, it is surprisingly working very well to set up and managing environments for embedded development. Conda is great for managing non-Python dependencies and setups.
Continue readingIn my previous article I showed how to import, build and debug MCUXpresso SDK projects in VS Code. In my lectures and labs we are using a robot based on the NXP Kinetis K22FX512 ARM Cortex-M4F microcontroller, and there is only the v2.13.0 SDK available.
The software on the robot uses the latest NXP MCUXpresso SDK v2.3.1. The he Eclipse based MCUXpresso IDE 11.8.0 works fine with all the 2.x SDKs, up to the latest 2.13.0 one.
Continue readingWe have a project imported, have built it, time to debug it on the hardware.
In a previous article I have imported an example project. Now I want to compile and build it.
Traditionally, the build action inside VS Code is somewhat hidden. There is a keyboard shortcut, but recent additions to VS Code making the build action more accessible.
After having imported the repository with the SDK, it is now time to create a first project.
In a previous article I have installed the MCUXpresso extension and used the MCUXpresso Installer to install the necessary development tools.
In this article I’m going to import the SDK.
MCU on Eclipse 