Newer releases of Processor Expert (e.g. in Kinetis Design Studio (KDS)) come with a ‘graphical’ (or ‘tabbed’) view of the Component Inspector. The UI elements are different and ‘tabs’ are using:
Component Inspector in Tabbed View
I like much more the earlier ‘no-tabs’ view. Luckily, there is a setting to switch the view back.
This is the start of a multi-post tutorial about the Freescale Kinetis SDK, released back in April as beta version. The SDK a set of peripheral drivers, and will become the standard software foundation and drivers provided by Freescale for their ARM Cortex based devices. Similar what other vendors already do. While this is a good step, it is the same time very disruptive for my university projects with new Freescale Cortex-M devices. And with everything new (and beta), it needs time to learn. So this post is about creating a Do-It-Yourself Kinetis SDK project from scratch for Eclipse. This part is about the startup code: about everything to get the application started.
FRDM-K64F with SD, nRF24L01+ and HC-06 Bluetooth
As outlined in “How to Add Register Details View in Eclipse“, I have a nice register detail level viewer for Eclipse and GDB. But one problem showed up: there were entries showing with %s:
PCR Register with %s
The reason is that the parser is not handling the dimElementGroup of CMSIS-SVD.
For a project I need to change the PWM duty cycle after a PWM period is over. One way to do this is to have an interrupt at the end of the PWM period, and then set the new PWM duty (compare) register value in the interrupt. That works fine for ‘slow’ PWM frequencies, but if the PWM frequency is high, the CPU load is massively increasing. A better way is to use DMA (Direct Memory Access).
FRDM-KL25Z with DMA PWM and Logic Analyzer
Semihosting is a technique to do printf() debugging through an active debug connection. So instead using a physical connection like RS-232 or USB CDC, the connection to the host machine is through the debugger. This post is about enabling and using semihosting with gcc and newlib/newlib-nano in Freescale Eclipse based Kinetis Design Studio (KDS) using the GNU ARM Eclipse plugins.
Semihosting Console View with output
The standard Eclipse registers view only shows the core registers:
Standard Registers View in Eclipse
I think it would be great to have a view to see all the device peripheral registers too?
Embedded System Registers View
If you want the same, then this article is for you. It works both for stock Eclipse and Freescale Kinetis Design Studion (KDS) 🙂
The Freescale FRDM-K64F is a great board for data logger applications: it has a powerful ARM Cortex M4F with 120 MHz, 1 MB Flash and 256 KByte RAM. Best of all: it already has a micro SD card socket on the board :-).
Data Logger with FRDM-K64F
Feeling that building a project in Eclipse (including Kinetis Design Studio) takes a long time? Then probably the ‘parallel build’ option is not enabled in your project: Using parallel build option reduces the needed time by factors. To give an example, to build a project with 56 source files takes 32 seconds without parallel build enabled:
no parallel build
With parallel build enabled this gets reduced down to less than 10 seconds:
Parallel Build Enabled
🙂
For the next semester I will do things differently in my advanced embedded systems programming course (INTRO) at the University of Lucerne: Instead of using the Freescale provided CodeWarrior, we will use a DIY tool chain for ARM with Eclipse Kepler.
Eclipse Kepler Ready for Classroom Usage
That way we we can offer students an open and convenient tool chain for their lab work, course assignments and own projects both at work and at home. So this post is about spending about 30 minutes to build your own tool chain which then can passed to students and coworkers so they have a complete toolchain installed in a few minutes.
In “Watchpoints: Data Breakpoints” I used the Eclipse based CodeWarrior to set breakpoints so the debugger stops when my application is writing or reading a certain memory location. That CodeWarrior is based on an earlier Eclipse version, and things are different in Eclipse Kepler and not so easy to find. So here is how I can use watchpoints in Eclipse Kepler:
Watchpoints in Breakpoint View
MCU on Eclipse 