Docker 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 recently upgraded from Win10 to Win11. Windows 10 was not great for building performance compared to Linux. And I feel that with Windows 11 things got worse too.
Dev Container in VS Code uses docker-based environments. This enables me using a full-featured development environment, with isolated dependencies. This is especially very useful for development in the embedded systems space. There I have to use many different SDKs, toolchains and libraries. Using Dev Containers is super easy. But file I/O operations with building etc/is not that great.
The solution is to use a Docker Volume with VS Code and Dev Container:
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:
“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
Agile Manifesto, https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
through early and continuous delivery
of valuable software.”
It is interesting to see that modern tools and agile development workflows are getting more and more into the embedded world. CI/CD is a strategy where code changes to an application get automatically integrated, tested and released automatically into a production environment.
MCU on Eclipse 