In my earlier post “S-Record Generation with gcc for ARM/Kinetis” I documented how to have the ARM GNU gcc toolchain to produce a S19 (Motorola (or now Freescale) S-Record) file. Here are a few more tips on that subject:
Eclipse based IDE’s have typically one limitation: the IDE has not much scripting capabilities. Yes, I can use things like JUnit for testing, but if it comes to build and debug C/C++ applications, then support gets really rare. An exception to this is CodeWarrior for MCU which features a command line version of the IDE which can be used for test automation as I used it in one of my tutorials. What I missed so far is to have a command line interface for Processor Expert to generate code. This is now possible with CodeWarrior for MCU10.5 :-).
The Eclipse IDE is in my view the best IDE in the world :-). But it is not the fastest one: All the functionality and comfort has a price, and such a Java and highly flexible IDE requires its resources. The Eclipse community is continuously addressing that concern, and for example the Eclipse Juno 4.2 IDE in CodeWarrior for MCU10.5 shows this nicely: things are much smoother compared to the Eclipse Indigo 3.7 in MCU10.4. But if you feel that you do not want to use Processor Expert because it is too slow, then I have a trick how to improve performance by a factor of 10 :-).
Sometimes I have ‘multiple definitions’ in my projects: this means that I have functions defined in one source files, and I need to ‘overwrite’ one or more with a version in another source file. For example I have a source file with utility functions (Utility.c), and I want to overwrite some of these functions with a different implementation in a different file (MyUtility.c). How can I do this?
In this semester course, students (and myself too, of course :-)) are building a Mini Sumo Robot. That robot is using the Freescale FRDM-KL25Z board with an ARM Cortex-M0+ on it. Today I’ll give an introduction to the ARM core to the class, and timing is right: this morning I have found an excellent overview about ARM microcontroller and tools written by Jay Carlson.: Getting Started with ARM Microcontrollers.
In my tutorial “Bits and Pins with Kinetis” I showed how to use the BitIO_LDD approach for Bit I/O access. I do not like this LDD (logical device driver) approach for several reasons:
Luckily, there is a way to hack around this 🙂
The ARM Cortex specification includes the ‘SysTick’ (System Tick Timer): a dedicated system timer which is intended to be used as time base for an RTOS. While technically it would be possible to use any periodic interrupt timer, I’m using as well the SysTick for my FreeRTOS ARM ports. And because Processor Expert includes a nice timer interface, I’m using the TimerUnit_LDD:
TimerUnit LDD for SysTick
While this is great for flexibility, it has its price in efficiency. That TimerUnit_LDD adds overhead. So I want to get rid of the TimerUnit_LDD and use a more efficient way.
For everyone who wants to build a Do-It-Yourself toolchain for Kinetis on Linux, I recommend to read the following excellent post by Karibe:
Setting up Linux opensource build and debug tools for freescale freedom board FRDM-KL25Z
He describes how to get OpenOCD with CMSIS-DAP working with Eclipse on Ubuntu to debug the FRDM-KL25Z board.
Happy Linuxing 🙂
A week ago, the updated FreeRTOS V7.5.0 has been released on FreeRTOS.org. So time to have my Processor Expert FreeRTOS component updated as well :-).
FreeRTOS V7.5.0
This is the second part of a multi-part tutorial about how to set up an open source tool chain with GNU ARM gcc + Eclipse to build and debug an application for Kinetis ARM devices.
Eclipse Kepler
