Tag Archives: Cortex

Tutorial: First Steps with Embedded Artists NXP i.MX RT1052 OEM Module

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Not ready for the complexity of a full blown Embedded Linux, but need that extra compute performance? Need an ARM Cortex-M7 running at 600 MHz module on a half-sized business card, ready to be integrated? Here we go: the Embedded Artists i.MX RT1052 OEM module:

Embedded Artists NXP i.MX RT1052 OEM Module

Embedded Artists NXP i.MX RT1052 OEM Module

Compute modules are very common in the Embedded Linux space, for example see this Toradex module. The reason is simple: these high-performance boards simplify the design, as I don’t have to care about the BGA packages and the external SDRAM and FLASH devices: everything is on a module I can easily integrate into my base board.

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Tutorial: Catching Rogue Memory Accesses with ARM Watchpoint Comparators and Instruction Trace

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In my “Tutorial: Catching Rogue Memory Accesses with Eclipse and GDB Watchpoints” I have used Eclipse/CDT and GDB watchpoints.  I used a conditional watchpoint, but this comes with a performance hit. In this article I show how to use the ARM Cortex trace hardware to catch specific writes to a memory location. Without severe performance degradation. But for this I need a little helper: the DEADBEEF catcher!

0xdeadbeef catcher

0xdeadbeef catcher

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Flash-Resident USB-HID Bootloader with the NXP Kinetis K22 Microcontroller

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The tinyK22 board (see “tinyK22 Boards arrived“) gets rolled out at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, so I thought I write-up an article this weekend how to use that board with a Flash Resident Bootloader.

tinyK22 with USB HID Bootloader

tinyK22 with USB HID Bootloader

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ARM SWO Performance Counters

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In “Cycle Counting on ARM Cortex-M with DWT” I have used the ARM DWT register to count the executed cycles. With the MCUXpresso IDE comes with a very useful feature: it can capture the ARM SWO (Single Wire Output) trace data. One special kind of trace data is the ‘cycle counter’ information which is sent through SWO.

SWO Counters

SWO Counters

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Is Developing for ARM more difficult than for other Architectures?

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I believe in ‘life-long-learning’. With this I continue to learn and discover new things every day. I’m writing tutorials to give something back to the community from which I have learned so much.

On top of this, I receive emails on a nearly daily basis, asking for help. Many articles have the origin in such requests or questions. I prefer questions or comments in a public forum, because that way I feel all others can benefit from it. Last week Alessandro contacted me with this:

“Hi Erich,

I hope this find you well! I’m starting to using ARM processors, but I find them quite complicated on the configuration side. I started in the past with PIC micro (PIC16) with asm, and I found them quite straightforward to be configured (clock, IO, peripherals, …). Then I moved myself on C language, and on PIC18 without any big issues.

Now I would really like join the ARM community, I see that these processors are what I’ve always looking for, on energy, calc power, peripherals, and FINALLY on IDE (editor, toolchain and utilities)… AMAZING!!!”

The topic is about how to start learning developing for ARM. Alessandro agreed to make this public, so I thought this might be a good topic for an article?

Firmware

Firmware

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Simulating Space on Earth: Irradiation Tests at the Paul Scherrer Institute

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Space is a hostile environment. Sending hardware to space means putting it under irradiation tests: exposing the object to radiation and see what happens :-). For this, under the lead of the ETHZ (Mathematical and Physical Geodesy), we had the opportunity to put the CubETH payload board under a proton beam. The test facility is at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Villigen, Switzerland:

Control Room at PSI

Control Room at PSI

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Tutorial: First Steps with NXP i.MX7 and Toradex Colibri Board

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I’m using in several projects different variants of Raspberry Pi boards: they are great and providing a lot of processing power. However, they are not suitable for any hard realtime systems. For a different class of projects I’m currently evaluating the NXP i.MX7 processors: the cool thing with these is that they have up to two ARM Cortex-A7 running at 1 GHz, plus a Cortex-M4 running at 200 MHz. And here things get really interesting: I can run a realtime application and FreeRTOS on that M4, while running Linux on the A7 :-).

i.MX7 on Colibri with Iris Carrier Board

i.MX7 on Colibri with Iris Carrier Board

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Tutorial: Using Single Wire Output SWO with ARM Cortex-M and Eclipse

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As a standard procedure, I add some console functionality to my embedded applications. That way I have a command line interface and can inspect and influence the target system. One interesting hardware feature of ARM Cortex-M is Single Wire Output (SWO): it allows to send out data (e.g. strings) over up to 32 different stimulus ports, over a single wire.

swo-pin-on-arm-debug-header

swo-pin-on-arm-debug-header

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ARM Cortex-M, Interrupts and FreeRTOS: Part 2

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In “ARM Cortex-M, Interrupts and FreeRTOS: Part 1”  I started with the ARM Cortex-M interrupt system. Because the ARM implementation cann be very confusing, I confused myself and had to fix and extend the description in Part 1 :-). Thank for all the feedback and comments!

Originally I wanted to cover FreeRTOS in Part 2. Based on the questions and discussions in Part 1 I thought it might be a good idea to provide visual examples.

NXP KV58F ARM Cortex-M7

NXP KV58F ARM Cortex-M7

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ARM Cortex-M, Interrupts and FreeRTOS: Part 1

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The ARM Cortex-M microcontroller are insanely popular. And it features a flexible and powerful nested vectored interrupt controller (NVIC). But for many, including myself, the Cortex-M interrupt system can be counter-intuitive, complex, inconsistent and confusing, leading to many bugs and lots of frustration :-(.

NXP KV58F ARM Cortex-M7

ARM Cortex-M7: NXP KV58

Understanding the NVIC and the ARM Cortex-M interrupt system is essential for every embedded application, but even for if using an realtime operating system: if you mess up with interrupts, very bad things will happen….

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Zumo Robot with Magnetic Encoders

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We are using robots to teach advanced embedded system programming at the Lucerne University (see “Sumo Robot Competition“). Students can buy the kit, and we are running out of available hardware. Time to produce a new series of robots :-). It took us a while to get to the next revision of the Zumo Robot, but finally the first one has been produced and assembled, and I think it is looking good :-).

Intro_Zumo_Robot

Intro_Zumo_Robot

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