For an university research project we are implementing a software simulator for the EZH (or SmartDMA) co-prozessor present on some NXP MCUs.
This article describes how to setup and build QEMU in a docker container, including debugging QEMU with VS Code.
Continue readingIn my earlier tutorial I showed how to install the necessary SDK tools. In this article I’m going to install the SDK sources. For this I’m going to use west. This is a command-line ‘meta-repository’ tool.
Git Submodules allow me to keep a git repository as a sub-directory in another git repository. This let me clone another repository into my project and keep sources in and libraries/SDKs in sync.
This can be a challenge if using CI/CD runners. They have to clone the repositories in a recursive way. It gets more complex if the sub-modules are not public. Because the CI/CD runner does not have access rights to the non-public repositories.
In this article I explain how I’m using git sub-modules in my CI/CD GitLab pipeline, both for public and private repositories
Continue readingDocker or Development Container are great for isolation. And they work very well with things outside which are TCP/IP based. But most debug probes are USB only. Docker container don’t work well with USB. In Remote Debugging with DevContainer and VS Code, I showed how to use USB based debug probes. I demonstrated using them with an IP connection. In this article I show how Windows USB devices can be used from a container, with the help of usbipd.
I’m shifting more and more of my CI/CD testing infrastructure using the LinkServer runner. One reason is the LinkServer runner can run the test on-target. It can also collect GNO gcov coverage information at the same time. LinkServer is a suite of software tools for launching and managing GDB servers for NXP debug probes.
Embedded System have a lifetime of 10 or 15 years. During that time the software and tools has to be maintained. This can be very challenging. Who knows if that compiler or tool used is still available in 10 years from now? Additionally installing and configuring the tool chain and environment for a new team member is difficult. Even worse: using a different host operating system for the cross development can produce different results or introduce issues.
One solution for all these problems is to use Docker images and containers. I can pack all the necessary tools and software into a virtual environment and container. But developing inside a container comes with many challenges. In this article I’ll show how Visual Studio Code or VS Code makes working with containers very easy. In this article I show how easy it is to use modern development tools and methodologies for embedded development.
Continue readingIn CI/CD for Embedded with VS Code, Docker and GitHub Actions, I used GitHub to build a pipeline. This setup supports continuous integration within a CI/CD environment.
This time, let’s do a similar thing. But instead of GitHub, I use GitLab with VS Code. And I use it for a project where three different MCUs are used: the Raspberry Pi Pico-W, an Espressif ESP32 plus the NXP K22FX512 on the Sumo robot:
MCU on Eclipse 