Tutorial: Creating Bare-bare Embedded Projects with CMake, with Eclipse included

MCU vendors offer SDKs and configuration tools: that’s a good thing, because that way I can get started quickly and get something up and running ideally in a few minutes. But this gets you into a dependency on tools, SDK and configuration tools too: changing later from one MCU to another can be difficult and time consuming. So why not get started with a ‘bare’ project, using general available tools, just with a basic initialization (clocking, startup code, CMSIS), even with the silicon vendor provided IDE and basic support files?

In this case, I show how you easily can do this with CMake, make and Eclipse, without the (direct) need of an SDK.

NXP LPC55S69-EVK with LoRa Shield
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MCUXpresso IDE 11.6.0

With a steady release train, NXP has released last week a new and updated version of their flagship IDE: the version 11.6.0 of the MCUXpresso IDE.

NXP MCUXpresso IDE V11.6.0

And there are several new and cool features with that release, including a power & energy profiler and CMake support.

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Visual Studio Code for C/C++ with ARM Cortex-M: Part 6 – IntelliSense

The previous parts were about installation, project setup, building, debugging and setting up a kit. This one is about setting up IntelliSense for Cross Development in Visual Studio Code which allows for browsing symbols or code completion:

Code Completion in Visual Studio
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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 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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Building and Flashing ESP32 Applications with Eclipse

The new semester is approaching in a very fast way, and so is the new lecture and lab module ‘Advanced Distributed Systems’ at the Lucerne University. For that module we are going to build a new ‘Sumo’ style robot with WLAN capabilities using the ESP32 chip. It will be a new robot PCB, and below is the current robot (based on NXP K22FX512) with the WLAN module connected to it:

Zumo connected to TTGO ESP32 module

Zumo connected to TTGO ESP32 module

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Tutorial: MCUXpresso SDK with Linux, Part 1: Installation and Build with Make

I admit: my work laptop machine is running a Windows 10 OS by default. But this does not prevent me running Linux in a Virtual Machine (VM). Each host platform has its benefits, and I don’t feel biased to one or the other, but I have started using Ubuntu more and more, simply because I have worked more on Embedded Linux projects. While I have used mostly Windows with Eclipse for NXP LPC, Kinetis and i.MX platforms in the past, I started using Ubuntu too from last year with the NXP MCUXpresso SDK. I did not find much documentation about this on the web, so I thought it might be a good idea to write a tutorial about it. So here we go…

Building NXP MCUXpresso SDK on Linux Ubuntu

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