In this post I tapped into how to print messages to a console using the Kinetis/Freedom board. I’m not a fan of printf() for multiple reasons: It is simply a bad thing for embedded systems programming. But as many have asked for it, here is how to say “hello” from the Freedom Board using printf():
Hello World on the Terminal
CodeWarrior for MCU10.3 comes with the ARM GNU 4.6.2 installed:
gcc 4_6_2 in MCU10.3 layout
What about switching to a different (newer) gcc?
Eclipse based CodeWarrior for MCU10.3 comes with gcc build tools for Kinetis/ARM cores. While it features the parallel build make, I noticed that especially for larger projects build times are not as fast as it should be. The good news is: I was able to cut down my build time to less than half with a simple change :-).
When I looked at the output folder where all the object and make files are stored by Eclipse, I noticed that it has as well the listing files generated:
Listing Files in output folder
Christmas and New Year time is great: Gifts and time to work on my home projects. But this post is not about one gift I have organized for myself: a Raspberry Pi ;-)). No, this post is about a gift I have received from Freescale: a *new* Freedom board, the FRDM-KL05Z :-).
FRDM-KL05Z Board and Box
Ahrg! Again my ARM application crashed somewhere and I ended up in a HardFault exception :-(. In my earlier post I used a handler to get information from the processor what happened. But it is painful to add this handler again and again. So I decided to make things easier for me: with a special HardFault Processor Expert component :-).
After adding this HardFault component to my project, it automatically adds an entry to the vector table. So no manual steps are needed: having the component in the project and enabled will do the needed steps.
I have successfully used CodeWarrior for MCU10.3 beta version for many projects. With the advent of the final CodeWarrior for MCU10.3, I want to migrate my existing projects to the new and final version. First: my existing projects work as well in the final version, which is good news. But there are two things to change to take advantage of the final 10.3:
If you have not noticed: the final CodeWarrior for MCU10.3 has been released on the Freescale web :-).
It comes with a few changes compared to the 10.3beta release, and one is about the library configuration. I noticed that new projects created with the wizard are around 4 KByte larger than I expect them to be. For example my rather simple application below uses 8 KByte of code, where my expectation would be in the range of around 4 KByte:
text data bss dec hex filename 8644 24 1108 9776 2630 Freedom_2x16_HTA.elf
“Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”.
strikes again. Well, the modified version of it:
“Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, but it will wait until it really, really goes wrong”.
It is always amazing to see that systems having a fundamental flaw, they can work for a long period. Only that on day X my application crashes. And when found the problem, I’m wondering how in the world it was *ever* working with that bug in it :-(.
It is as bad as this: my application stopped in an unhandled interrupt service routine:
That does not tell much. I’m using Processor Expert generated code, and with this all my ‘unhandled’ vectors are pointing the same handler:
Continue readingSometimes it is necessary to write an interrupt service routine in assembly language. This is the case as well for the ARM Cortex-M0+ which is found in the KL25Z on my Freedom board. But there is something important about the ARM Cortex architecture: Thumb Mode.
Thumb mode the ‘ARM way’ to reduce the code size with a reduced (16bit wide) instruction set. The ARM architecture can implement a ‘mixed’ mode, on a function level. To distinguish between ‘normal’ ARM functions and ‘thumb’ functions, the processor is checking if the LSB (Least Significant Bit) of a function pointer (or function call destination) is set. So a jump address of 0x410 is for a ‘normal’ function, while a function jump to the address 0x411 (even if the function is located at the address 0x410) denotes a ‘thumb’ function.
MCU on Eclipse 