MCU on Eclipse

On a lifelong learning journey …

Building a Raspberry Pi UPS and Serial Login Console with tinyK22 (NXP K22FN512)

Posted on May 5, 2019 by Erich Styger

There are different ways to ruin a Linux system. For the Raspberry Pi which uses a micro SD card as the storage device by default, it comes with two challenges:

Excessive writes to the SD card can wear it out
Sudden power failure during a SD card write can corrupt the file system

For problem one I do I have a mitigation strategy (see “Log2Ram: Extending SD Card Lifetime for Raspberry Pi LoRaWAN Gateway“). Problem two can occur by user error (“you shall not turn it off without a sudo poweroff!”) or with the event of a power outage or black out. So for that problem I wanted to build a UPS for the Raspberry Pi.

Raspberry Pi with UPS System and tinyK22

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TrustZone with ARMv8-M and the NXP LPC55S69-EVK

Posted on April 27, 2019 by Erich Styger

The ARM TrustZone is an optional security feature for Cortex-M33 which shall improve the security for embedded applications running on microcontroller as the NXP LPC55S69 (dual-core M33) on the LPC55S69-EVK.

NXP LPC55S69-EVK Board

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First Steps with the LPC55S69-EVK (Dual-Core ARM Cortex-M33 with Trustzone)

Posted on April 22, 2019 by Erich Styger

For the long Easter weekend I have organized a new toy: the NXP LPC55S69-EVK board: a dual ARM Cortex-M33 running at 100 MHz with ARM TrustZone:

LPC55S69 Microcontroller

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Remote Debugging with USB based JTAG/SWD Debug Probes

Posted on March 2, 2019 by Erich Styger

For some projects it is not possible to have the device under debug available on my desk: the board might be in another room, on another site or in a place where physical access is not possible or even dangerous. In that case an IP-based debug probe (see Debugging ARM Cores with IP based Debug Probes and Eclipse) is very useful: as long as I can access its IP address, that works fine. It is an excellent solution even if the board is moving or rotating: hook it up to a WLAN access point and I still can use it as it would be on my desk.

But what if I have a debug probe only connected to USB? This article shows how to turn a USB debug probe into a IP-based debug solution: that way I can easily debug a board from remote, connected to the network:

IP Based Debugging with USB Debug Probe

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MCUXpresso IDE V10.3.1 available

Posted on February 24, 2019 by Erich Styger

On Friday a new release of the Eclipse Oxygen based NXP MCUXpresso IDE V10.3.1 has been made available. The IDE supports MacOS, Linux and Windows 32/64-bit and will be 64-bit only going forward.

MCUXpresso 10.3.1 About Information

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Different Ways of Software Configuration

Posted on February 23, 2019 by Erich Styger

Most of the time software needs some way to configure things: depending on the settings, the software will do different things. For example the software running on the microcontroller on top of the Raspberry might have the OLED LCD available or not:

Raspberry Pi and tinyK22 (NXP Kinetis K22FN512) with OLED LCD

How can I deal with this in my application code? Continue reading →

Debugging the Startup Code with Eclipse and GDB

Posted on February 17, 2019 by Erich Styger

By default, when debugging an embedded application, the target usually stops at main():

stopped in main

That’s usually fine, but what if I want to debug the code out of reset?

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Tutorial: Changing ARM Cortex Core or Microcontroller in Eclipse CDT Projects

Posted on February 9, 2019 by Erich Styger

Sometimes I start a project with an ARM microcontroller, and in the middle of the project I find out that it was a wrong choice at the beginning and I need to switch the microcontroller derivative or even the used ARM core. With little knowledge of the project structure and the files needed, such a switch is not the easiest thing, but definitely possible.

switching cores

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Tutorial: Blinky with the NXP LPC845-BRK Board

Posted on February 3, 2019 by Erich Styger

The NXP LPC845-BRK board is a sub-$6 breadboard friendly development board with an ARM Cortex-M0+ on it. This tutorial is about developing a ‘blinky’ on it using MCUXpresso.

Binky on NXP LPC845-BRK Board

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Tutorial: Transforming the NXP LPC845-BRK into a CMSIS-DAP Debug Probe

Posted on February 2, 2019 by Erich Styger

The NXP LPC845-BRK board is a tiny an inexpensive (sub $6) breakout board. The board includes a CMSIS-DAP (LPC11U35) on-board debug probe which can be used as a debug probe to debug any NXP LPC, Kinetis or i.MX RT device 🙂

LPC845-BRK used to debug a Sumo Battle Robot

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