I have to make an application configuration decision: Using USB CDC or RS-232?
In the lab I use a Tower system which offers both RS-232 and USB connectivity. It uses a FSShell component to communicate with a terminal on the host. Typically this is using an RS-232 serial cable connected to the host. Well, the challenge is that today most notebooks do not have a serial port any more. But they have USB.
In my class a student wanted to run CodeWarrior MCU10.2 with Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) on a 64bit notebook. According to the Freescale Website, that version of Ubuntu is not supported. And indeed, if you install CodeWarrior and launch it, it does not work. The splash screen comes up, but then it aborts. Claiming in the workspace/.metadata/.log file that it cannot find the libswt-gtk-java and libxtst6 packages. Continue reading
I had a partner project meeting a couple of weeks ago. That project kicked off mid 2011 and came to an end with that meeting. That project started for me with a conflict and ended with a question: are engineers just pessimists? Continue reading
Multiple screens are a real productivity booster for every developer: it extends your ‘real estate’ and allows you to have more things visible all the time. Personally I always have a dual screen system in use. Well, except when I’m traveling. But I wish I would have it there too! Eclipse started to support the multiscreen environment already a while back. Continue reading
I have mentioned in MCU10.2 released a new feature in CodeWarrior: support for the USB Universal Multilink FX from P&E Microcomputer Systems. Two Multilink FX arrived last week at the University, and finally I had my hands around it. The first thing which came to my mind when I saw the picture of the device on the P&E website: the black boxes are back!
Can I hope for a “Special FX Edition” in that box with cool sunglasses and a flash stick to erase and reprogram FLASH memory of microcontrollers? That would definitely make the flash erasing and programming easy and fast, as in the movie. 🙂
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At the University the lectures started, and as well all the bachelor diploma and industry projects. So I am running out of my TWR-MCF52259 boards as they are used by my students. No problem, as I have one remaining board in my shelf. I plugged the board into my machine, but YIKES! Look at this:
Chinese OSBDM?
Yikes! Flashing failed!
All I wanted to do was to re-flash my boot loader on the TWR-LCD board with the ColdFire V1 MCF51JM128 on it. Trying to this gave me a P&E Connection Assistant dialog: Continue reading
Ahhrg! Again, my microcontroller stopped in an interrupt. And I have no clue why?
Using Processor Expert in MCU10 is a great thing as it takes care about the vector table. Usually the default settings for code generation are fine, but not in my case here. If you run into a spurious and unexpected interrupt, you stop in the Cpu_Interrupt() handler:
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I use a Intel processor to write this text, and this processor is is using Little Endian for the byte order. This is about Endian, not Indian :-).
Many processors I have programmed were Big Endians. With the addition of Freescale Kinetis (an ARM Cortex M4) and DSC in MCU10.2, I have a daily mixture with Big Endian (S08, ColdFire, …) and Little Endian (DSC and Kinetis).
The term “endian” is described nicely in the IEN 137 written 1980 by Danny Cohen:
“ON HOLY WARS AND A PLEA FOR PEACE“.
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MCU on Eclipse 