Tag Archives: Building

About build tools, make files, compiling and linking.

Binary, do you use Hard-Float or Soft-Float?

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Many cost-sensitive ARM Cortex-M devices like the M0+ do not have a hardware floating point unit, and some like the M4 only has an optional single-precision floating point unit (FPU). As outlined in “Be aware: Floating Point Operations on ARM Cortex-M4F“, using floating point operations without a hardware unit can be costly.

Looking at the disassembly for sure will tell you if the hardware is handling the float or double operation or not:

Disassembly showing runtime routines

But who wants check the all the disassembly? With the GNU tools there is an easier way: readelf.

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CNC + Laser = Personalized Cutting Board

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This blog usually features Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs), but my other passion are Personalized Cutting Boards :-).

It has been a while since my last CNC or laser cutter post, so I thought I showcase just quickly one of the recent designs.

Personalized Cutting Board
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‘Experience Energy’ at the Verkehrshaus: The ‘House of Energy’ Construction Kit

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The ‘Verkehrshaus der Schweiz‘, the ‘Swiss Museum of Transport’ is Switzerland’s most popular museum.

In April 2023, it opened up a new building and the ‘Experience Energy!’ exhibition. For the opening event we created a unique construction kit to explore energy: from harvesting to storing and up to distributing and using energy.

“House of Energy” at the Swiss Museum of Transport in Lucerne
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Moving Pixel Clock Project

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Clock projects are cool. LED projects are cool too. And if it moves, the better. So why not building a moving pixel LED mechatronics clock? A matrix with addressable RGB LEDs, each can change color and is moved by a tiny stepper motor, to let pixels stand out?

Moving Pixel Clock
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Building with CMake Presets

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I’m getting my head more and more around CMake and its features. After having so many issues with VS Code dealing with CMake Kits, I have found feature in CMake which really is a game changer for me: CMake Presets.

Working with CMake Presets in VS Code
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“No Kit Selected”: Fixing VS Code CMake Kit Assignment

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One important thing in using VS Code and CMake projects is that one needs to have a CMake kit assigned to the project. But after a restart of VS Code or if I re-load a project, VS Code has lost the previously assigned CMake kit:

VS Code has forgotten about the previously assigned CMake Kit?

This is very annoying, but luckily I have found a fix for this.

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Implementing File I/O Semihosting for the RP2040 and VS Code

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I’m working recently on a new lecture module using the Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040) board, which highlights several aspects of modern software engineering, including DevOps and CI/CD. An important part of any CI/CD pipeline is testing. For a host application, one could pass arguments to the application, e.g. ‘myapp --test=module1‘, or let it read such information from a configuration file which describes the tests. Or write GNU gcov data to a file to collect coverage information.

Unfortunately, a normal embedded application has no argv[], and many system have no file system. A solution to this problem would be using semihosting with file I/O. Unfortunately for the Raspberry Pi Pico SDK 1.5.1 for the RP2040, there is no semihosting file I/O implemented :-(.

I have now implemented and added file I/O to the SDK, making it possible for the RP2040 to access and use files on the host, among other things. This greatly extends the capabilities of the device, and is very useful for testing, including gathering test coverage information.

RP2040 writing files on the host with semihosting
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CI/CD for Embedded with VS Code, Docker and GitHub Actions

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“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
through early and continuous delivery
of valuable software.”

Agile Manifesto, https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

It is interesting to see that modern tools and agile development workflows are getting more and more into the embedded world. CI/CD is a strategy where code changes to an application get automatically integrated, tested and released automatically into a production environment.

VS Code with CI/CD
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VS Code: Importing pre-v2.13.0 MCUXpresso SDK Projects

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In my previous article I showed how to import, build and debug MCUXpresso SDK projects in VS Code. In my lectures and labs we are using a robot based on the NXP Kinetis K22FX512 ARM Cortex-M4F microcontroller, and there is only the v2.13.0 SDK available.

INTRO Sumo Robot
Sumo Robot with K22FX512

The software on the robot uses the latest NXP MCUXpresso SDK v2.3.1. The he Eclipse based MCUXpresso IDE 11.8.0 works fine with all the 2.x SDKs, up to the latest 2.13.0 one.

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