Category Archives: NXP

New FreeRTOS V10.0.0: Amazon, Segger SystemView and Percepio Tracealyzer

Posted on by
33

“Amazon FreeRTOS – IoT operating system for microcontrollers”: The announcement of FreeRTOS V10.0.0 was one of the biggest news last week for me. Not only is there now a Version 10, the bigger news is that FreeRTOS is now part of Amazon. Wow! Now this explains why Richard Barry (the founder behind FreeRTOS) was kind of hiding away for about a year: he joined Amazon as a principal engineer about a year ago. I think we all have to wait and see what it means for FreeRTOS.

Amazon FreeRTOS

Amazon FreeRTOS (Source: Amazon Web Site)

Continue reading →

First tinyK22 Board with NXP K22FN512 ARM Cortex-M4F

Posted on by
34

The NXP Freedom boards are very popular. Many of them are inexpensive (less than $20), include a debug interface and can be easily extended with extra shields or boards. Especially the FRDM-KL25Z is very popular: I’m getting told because of Processor Expert and tutorials available on web sites like this one ;-).

Unfortunately there are no small or breadboard friendly Kinetis boards available. There is the NXP LPC800-DIP but with no onboard debugger and without Processor Expert support. We have the tinyK20, but projects tend to use more CPU power, FLASH and RAM space than what the tinyK20 board (50 MHz, 128 KByte FLASH, 16 KByte RAM) can provide. So we ended up designing the big brother of the first tinyK20: the tinyK22 with 120 MHz, 512 KByte of FLASH and 128 KByte of RAM.

tinyK22 Overview

tinyK22 Overview

Continue reading →

Eclipse MCUXpresso IDE 10.1 with integrated MCUXpresso Configuration Tools

Posted on by
49

Back in March 2017, NXP had rolled the MCUXpresso IDE starting with Version 10.0.0. With the intent to unify the SDK, LPCXpresso, CodeWarrior, Kinetis Design Studio and Processor Expert into one unified and integrated set of tools. V10.0.0 was a good start. The MCUXpresso IDE V10.0.2 in July was more of a smaller update, and the Pin and Clock configuration tools were not integrated, no added tool for peripheral configuration.

A week ago the MCUXpresso V10.1.0 has been released which shows where the journey is going: an free-of-charge and code size unlimited Eclipse based integrated set of tools to configure, build and debug Cortex-M (Kinetis, LPC and i.MX RT) microcontroller/processor based applications.

Clock Tool inside MCUXpresso IDE

Clock Tool inside MCUXpresso IDE

I have used it for a week, and although many things are still new, I thought I’m able to give an overview about what is new.

Continue reading →

Exploring a Microcontroller and Software and Tools for the next Project

Posted on by
6

I’m using many microcontroller in my projects. And a lot more are available out there in the ecosystem. Like many others, I tend to select what I am familiar with. But is this the correct approach to select the hardware and tools for a next project?

Microcontroller Boards

Microcontroller Boards

Continue reading →

Using a Custom Debug Perspective in Eclipse

Posted on by
5

The MCUXpresso IDE comes with a ‘Develop’ perspective which combines the usual C/C++ and the Debug perspective in one:

MCUXpresso Develop Perspective

MCUXpresso Develop Perspective

Continue reading →

Dealing with Eclipse and Very Small Icons on Ultra High Density Displays

Posted on by
21

More and more these very-very-high-resolution (UHD, Ultra-High-Density) notebook displays show up in my class rooms.These displays have 3100×1800 or even more pixels, making it great for watching high-resolution videos or for playing games (maybe?). But such a high-resolution makes many tools including Eclipse very hard to use, because the toolbar icons get so tiny that they are really hard to hit with a mouse cursor on Windows:

Eclipse Icons with UHD Display

Eclipse Icons with UHD Display

Continue reading →

Using Serial Terminal and COM Support in Eclipse Oxygen and Neon

Posted on by
13

Most of the time I’m using a dedicated terminal program like Termite or PuTTY to connect to a board using virtual or non-virtual COM port. Another way is to use the Eclipse built-in Terminal view: that way no extra program is needed to communicate with a real or virtual COM port to my target device:

Terminal Command Output

Terminal Command Output

Continue reading →

McuOnEclipse Components: 25-Sept-2017 Release

Posted on by
11

I’m pleased to announce that a new release of the McuOnEclipse components is available in SourceForge. In this release more ARM Cortex devices/vendors are supported with different SDKs, plus it comes with several FreeRTOS enhancements for debugging highly optimized code.

SourceForge

SourceForge

Continue reading →

Managing Project and Library Dependencies with Eclipse CDT

Posted on by
9

For several projects I’m using library projects: I build a library and then use that library in the other project. If I change something in a library, I want to run make both on the referenced libraries and rebuild my application if needed. If you don’t know how to do this, then read on… 🙂

Shared Library Projects

Shared Library Projects

(… actually it means workign around  known Eclipse CDT bug too….)

Continue reading →

Using Multiple Memory Regions with the FreeRTOS Heap

Posted on by
5

ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers can have multiple memory controllers. This is a good thing as it allows the hardware to do multiple parallel memory read/writes. However this makes the memory map more complicated for the software: it divides the memory into different regions and memory segments.  This article is about how to enable FreeRTOS to use multiple memory blocks for a virtual combined memory heap:

FreeRTOS with Segmented Heap Memory

FreeRTOS with Segmented Heap Memory

Continue reading →