FreeRTOS V7.1.1 was released beginning of May 2012. Finally I had some week-end time to integrate the changes and upgrade the Processor Expert component for it. V7.1.1 comes with smaller and larger changes. This includes maintenance and better support for various ports. One change is the removal of CLI from the original FreeRTOS distribution, an extra port macro and one trace hook macro.
The Freescale ColdFire V2 (MCF52259) is a great communication device: an embedded Processor like a Swiss Army Knife: Great peripherals, USB and Ethernet interface, a lot of flash application space and up to 64 KByte of RAM. I’m using that core in many projects, and there is great community support for it with boards and software. Unfortunately Freescale somehow provides Processor Expert support only half way for it. Support for the I2C bus is missing :-(.
Once I have a carefully configured Processor Expert component, I can use the approach described in Drag&Drop in Processor Expert to copy that component to a different project. However, this requires that the destination project is present in the same workspace. So how can I transfer a component with its settings from one workspace to another? Or from one machine to another?
The FSL_USB_Stack Processor Expert component (see USB CDC reloaded) has been extended to support USB CDC for the Freescale S08MM128 targeted for medical devices:
Choice of devices
The FSL_USB_Stack Embedded Component presented in “USB CDC, reloaded” has been updated to V1.004 and is available here. I was running into issues if the USB CDC stack had to send out either 16 or 32 bytes of data in the App_Task() function. In that case the data is not sent until the next USB_Class_CDC_Interface_DIC_Send_Data() request.
As shown in Tracing FreeRTOS with a Hardware Probe: I have a nice hardware probe to trace out events from my application. But what about to use the target memory as trace buffer? New devices have much more on-chip memory, so this could be an attractive option. That was on my list of future extensions, but then the news came in: Percepio announced their collaboration with FreeRTOS+Trace: exactly what I needed!
It is using the same concept as the FreeRTOS Trace Probe: the trace hooks provided by the FreeRTOS API. But instead streaming it off the target as with the FreeRTOS Trace probe, it is using a RAM buffer on the device. The real cool thing is: the Percepio trace viewer is very, very nice!
Using an RTOS is an excellent thing: it provides services and allows to scale my application. But it adds complexity. With many tasks, queues and semaphores it is hard to have an overview what is going on. To get visibility, Martin Bucher has developed in a bachelor diploma work the FreeRTOS Trace Probe. Continue reading
The Processor Expert USB CDC component posted in USB or not: CDC with Processor Expert has found many friends :-). A new version is available for download here with examples. It adds a bunch of new features and makes many things: simpler dependencies and setup, generation of an easily accessible cdc.inf and availability of error hooks. I have it running now with the TWR-MCF52259 and the DEMOJM (MCF51JM128 and S08JM60). Continue reading
I had a PREN student showing up into my office. He wanted to choose a microcontroller for that project. One requirement put on the table was “it needs USB”. Well, I asked why USB is required. I was not surprised by the answer: “to use USB instead of RS-232”. Wow. So what he really wanted was USB CDC (Communication Device Class). Yep. Most notebooks today have no serial COM port (see “Processor Expert Configurations“). But because “USB is serial” does not mean “USB CDC is simple”. Nope. USB is not simple. But it can be with Processor Expert.
One thing which is missing with the CodeWarrior for MCU10.2 announcement: MCU10.2 does not support the S12(X) from Freescale.
With this I still have several projects not ported to eclipse. So they are still implemented using the ‘classic’ (non-eclipse based) version of CodeWarrior for S12(X). And I’m using FreeRTOS in the eclipse based IDE with Processor Expert for S08, ColdFire and Kinetis, but not yet for the S12(X). What now?
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MCU on Eclipse 