Tag Archives: Debugging

FTF: FRDM-K64F, Kinetis Design Studio and Kinetis SDK

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I’m attending the Freescale Technology Forum (FTF) in Dallas this year: As they say here: “everything is bigger in Texas”, that’s the motto of this conference ;-). The conference is packed, and I have a hard time to keep up with all the things going on. My focus is obviously everything around Eclipse and ARM microcontroller. The conference started yesterday afternoon with hands-on labs, and I was in the one were Freescale presented the new ‘Kinetis Design Studio’: a free of charge/unlimited Eclipse tool chain based on Eclipse Kepler, GCC and GDB. Freescale presented their new software library ‘Kinetis SDK’. And: There is a new Freedom board which gets handed out to the attendees: the FRDM-K64F :-).

Texas Style Glass Coverage

Texas Style Glass Coverage

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Variable Debugging with Eclipse Kepler

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The current Eclipse Kepler version comes with changes for debugging variables. I have students coming from the earlier Eclipse versions, so here are a few tips for dealing with variables in Eclipse Kepler.

Variables View in Eclipse

Variables View in Eclipse

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Sharing Debug Configuration with Eclipse

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Maybe you had this problem too: you shared a project with somebody, only to realize that your carefully crafted debug configuration was not shared?

Eclipse has the concept to store settings in the ‘framework’. The ‘framework’ is the Eclipse internal data, basically what is inside the .metadata folder of the workspace.

metadata folder in workspace

metadata folder in workspace

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DIY Free Toolchain for Kinetis: Part 10 – Project Creation with GNU ARM Eclipse 2.1.1

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As mentioned in Part 9: There is a new GNU ARM Eclipse plugin 2.1.1, and this one makes project creation for Freescale devices easier than ever 🙂

  • Native Kinetis-L project templates for FRDM-KL25Z and FRDM-KL46Z boards
  • Easier than ever project creation for Processor Expert projects
GNU ARM Eclipse 2.1.1

GNU ARM Eclipse 2.1.1

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DIY Free Toolchain for Kinetis: Part 9 – Express Setup in 8 Steps

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On Monday the new semester starts, and yet again: we will do a Sumo thing :-). They can choose which tool chain they would like to use to develop their application for the ARM Cortex-M0+ used from Freescale. One option is to create a ‘Do-It-Yourself’ toolchain. Since the start of the series, things have evolved: there is a new GNU ARM tool chain available, Segger has updated their drivers, and most important the GNU ARM Eclipse plugin has been greatly extended to support Freescale parts and Processor Expert. So instead to read through all the previous tutorials, this one is about putting together a free tool chain less than 10 minutes (not counting the time to download around 500 MByte).

DIY Eclipse Toolchain

DIY Eclipse Toolchain

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Debugging the same Project Multiple Times in Parallel with Eclipse

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I have I project which I want to debug on multiple boards the same time. So how can I download and debug the same application to multiple boards/processors, and debug them all the same time from within the same workspace and Eclipse IDE?

This is a typical scenario I have with my RNet stack: the same application runs on multiple boards, and I want to debug all the boards with the same project with the same Eclipse. For example to wireless sensor nodes with the RNet nRF24L01+ stack as in the picture below:

Two FRDM-KL25Z with nRF24L01+ Transceivers

Two FRDM-KL25Z with nRF24L01+ Transceivers

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DIY Free Toolchain for Kinetis: Part 7 – GNU ARM Eclipse Plugins

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Tired by the tool chains provided by your silicon vendor? Do you want to use a free and open tool chain? Then you probably followed by “DIY Free Toolchain” series already. In “DIY Free Toolchain for Kinetis: Part 2 – Eclipse IDE” I used the standard GNU Eclipse plugins. As mentioned in above post, there is an even better and more powerful plugin available: the GNU ARM Eclipse plug-ins. There is a dedicated blog site which provides excellent documentation and direct access to new and frequent releases. And these days there is a true a Christmas gift for every Eclipse lover: the version 1.1.7 with the addition of J-Link debugger plugin :-).

GNU ARM Eclipse (http://gnuarmeclipse.livius.net)

GNU ARM Eclipse

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New P&E OpenSDA Firmware v114

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Good news for everyone having Windows 8.1: P&E has released Dec 11th 2013 a new FRDM board firmware which solves the bootloader issue found with Windows 8.1. The new firmware can download from https://www.pemicro.com/opensda/.

New PnE OpenSDA Firmware

New PnE OpenSDA Firmware

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Review: ThunderBench with the Freescale FRDM Board and Processor Expert

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For the Eclipse and Processor Expert lovers of this world: there is another Eclipse based IDE you can use: ThunderBench made by Emprog:

ThunderBench for ARM Eclipse Startup Screen

ThunderBench for ARM Eclipse Startup Screen

They support a range of ARM based devices, including the Freescale ones I’m using. So I downloaded the v3.24 30 day trial from their download page last week. Finally I have found some time to try it out. Could this be an alternative to use my Freescale FRDM boards with Processor Expert?

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Eclipse Command Line Code Generation with Processor Expert

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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 :-).

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