Recovering Cortex-M Microcontroller with a Power Glitch

If a Cortex microcontroller is unresponsive to a debug connection for various reasons, then this trick might help to recover that device for you. All you need is a debug probe from PEMICRO and a utility.

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Using FatFS and MinINI with the NXP LPC55S16 EVK

For a research project we selected the NXP LPC55S16 but because it has due the silicon shortage it is not available probably for the next 52 weeks (yikes!) we can use the EVK Board.

The FatFS file system from Elm Chan is the de-facto file system for many embedded systems. As such it comes integrated with silicon vendor SDKs like the NXP MCUXpresso SDK. The problem is that the SDK only has examples for things on the board, and because that board does not have a SD card socket, no example for using FatFS with an SDK card is provided :-(. So I had to create one, and you can get it from GitHub.

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Visual Studio Code for C/C++ with ARM Cortex-M: Part 5 – ToolKit

The previous parts were about installation, project setup, building and debugging. This one is about defining the ‘tool kit’ so I can make use more of the CMake infrastructure in Visual Studio Code:

Tool Chain loaded in Visual Studio Code
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Visual Studio Code for C/C++ with ARM Cortex-M: Part 4 – Debug

The previous parts were about installation, project setup and building. This one is about debugging an ARM Cortex-M Microcontroller with Visual Studio Code:

Cortex-M4 (NXP K22FN512) Debugging with Visual Studio Code
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Visual Studio Code for C/C++ with ARM Cortex-M: Part 3 – Build

This is the third part in a series to get up and running using the Microsoft Visual Studio Code for embedded development on ARM Cortex-M. So far we have installed the needed tools, created a project and are able to build it from the command line. Now it is about how execute directly scripts or the build from the IDE.

Building with a Visual Studio Code Task
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Visual Studio Code for C/C++ with ARM Cortex-M: Part 2 – Project

This is the second part of series or articles how to use the Microsoft Visual Studio Code for embedded development on ARM Cortex-M. In this part I’m going to show how to create and build a project using CMake running Make or Ninja as build system.

Building with Visual Studio a simple ARM Cortex-M Project (NXP K22FN512)
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Visual Studio Code for C/C++ with ARM Cortex-M: Part 1 – Installation

For a few months I’m learning and using Rust. I’m still learning, but I’m very impressed by the powerful and cool programming language, the vibrant ecosystem, the advanced concepts behind it and by the tools. With learning Rust I have been using the Visual Studio Code IDE and it works great for Rust. But I was wondering: could I use it for my ‘usual’ C/C++ development on ARM Cortex-M devices too? The answer is a clear ‘yes’, and this mini series of articles should get you up and running too.

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Upgrade to a new NXP MCUXpresso SDK

As time flies by, my projects are evolving. My lab projects get used over multiple semesters, and the MCUXpresso projects by default use the SDK version used at that time.

This is great because I do want to have control over what SDK is used. But from time to time it makes sense to upgrade a project to a newer version. In this post I’ll show how an existing project can be upgraded to use a new SDK.

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Attach with the Debugger to a Running Target

Sometime I’m pretty sure I wrote about a topic I can find or refer to, and I was pretty sure I did write about ‘attaching to a running target’ using MCUXpresso IDE in an article, but Google does not find it? The only rational outcome is that I can blame Google and I have to come up with a potential duplicate ;-).

Anyway: attaching to a running target is such an essential life saver it deserves a dedicated article.

Haltet Target
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Debug Firmware Switching for the LPC4322

In “Freelink LPC4322JET100 based Debug Circuit on NXP i.MX RT1064-EVK Board” I described how to change the factory firmware from OpenSDA to the LPC-Link2 one.

Debug Circuit on i.MX RT1064
Debug Circuit on i.MX RT1064

Now it is possible to use a Segger J-Link firmware too, or to switch back to the factory default one.

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