You might wonder what ‘Zork‘ is? Zork is one of the first and earlist fictive computer games, written around 1977 and 1979, written in MDL on a DEC PDP-10 by members of the MIT Dynamic Modelling group (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork). I believe the first time I have played Zork was around 1984 on a Commodore 64.
Zork
Eclipse is great: it gives me the tools and capabilities to solve the really hard bugs to find. An example of that ‘hard’ category are ‘rogue’ memory accesses: something in the application is accessing an unwanted memory location and corrupts the data. This might be very sporadic, or takes a long while until it happens. With normal ‘stop-mode’ debugging (setting a normal breakpoint) and stepping usually won’t let me find that bug, as it might be coming from a pointer somewhere. Maybe from an interrupt routine. Or maybe an unitialized or corrupted pointer corrupts to my memory. Usually all what I know is the memory adddress of the data, maybe what is written, but not what or who is writing to that location.
In this article I’m using one of the ‘less-known’ debugging techniques available in Eclipse and CDT and how it works: watchpoints!
Watchpoint with Condition
In this article I’m using one of the ‘less-known’ debugging techniques available in Eclipse and CDT and how it works: watchpoints!
I noticed on Mouser.com that there is a new i.MX RT1050 board: the EVKB one. I have used the EVK (the one without the ‘B’) for several weeks (see “MCUXpresso IDE V10.1.0 with i.MX RT1052 Crossover Processor” and “Adding a Rocktech Capacitive Touch LCD to the NXP i.MX RT1052 EVK“). I needed anyway a second board, so I ordered that EVKB from Mouser, and after some delay and waiting it arrived on my desk. So far this boards seems to be a better one:
i.MX RT1050 EVKB Board
FreeRTOS includes a nice feature to give me information about how much time every task is spending running on the system:
FreeRTOS Runtime Information
This tutorial explains that FreeRTOS Runtime Statistics feature and how it can be turned on and used.
Is BLACK the color of the season? My students really seem to love these ‘dark’ Eclipse themes. Well, I tried ‘dark’ themes in the past, but I have not been vey excited about it. Somehow I preferred more the ‘black on white background’ thing. But: I have now managed to install the ‘Darkest Dark’ Eclipse theme into the NXP MCUXpresso 10.2 IDE for my daily work, and I feel it hurts my eyes less? Maybe I’m getting older? Or could it really be that ‘dark’ look and feel?
Darkest Dark Theme with MCUXpresso IDE
Find out for yourself in the following article….
The Teensy boards are great, but as they are they are not really useful for real development, as they lack proper SWD debugging. In “Modifying the Teensy 3.5 and 3.6 for ARM SWD Debugging” I have found a way to get SWD debugging working, at that time with Kinetis Design Studio and the Segger J-Link. This article is about how debug the Teensy with free MCUXpresso IDE and the $20 NXP LPC-Link2 debug probe:
Teensy 3.6 with NXP LPC-Link2
In “Eclipse MCUXpresso IDE 10.1 with integrated MCUXpresso Configuration Tools” I mentioned that I wanted to try the i.MX RT1050 processor. Well, finally my ordered board from Mouser arrived, right on time for the week-end, so I had a chance to use that ARM Cortex-M7 running at 600 MHz :-).
i.MX RT1050 EVK
Back in March 2017, NXP had rolled the MCUXpresso IDE starting with Version 10.0.0. With the intent to unify the SDK, LPCXpresso, CodeWarrior, Kinetis Design Studio and Processor Expert into one unified and integrated set of tools. V10.0.0 was a good start. The MCUXpresso IDE V10.0.2 in July was more of a smaller update, and the Pin and Clock configuration tools were not integrated, no added tool for peripheral configuration.
A week ago the MCUXpresso V10.1.0 has been released which shows where the journey is going: an free-of-charge and code size unlimited Eclipse based integrated set of tools to configure, build and debug Cortex-M (Kinetis, LPC and i.MX RT) microcontroller/processor based applications.
Clock Tool inside MCUXpresso IDE
I have used it for a week, and although many things are still new, I thought I’m able to give an overview about what is new.
The MCUXpresso IDE comes with a ‘Develop’ perspective which combines the usual C/C++ and the Debug perspective in one:
MCUXpresso Develop Perspective
Most of the time I’m using a dedicated terminal program like Termite or PuTTY to connect to a board using virtual or non-virtual COM port. Another way is to use the Eclipse built-in Terminal view: that way no extra program is needed to communicate with a real or virtual COM port to my target device:
Terminal Command Output
NXP has released an updated of their Eclipse based IDE for ARM Cortex-M (Kinetis and LPC) microcontroller: the version v10.0.2 build 411:
MCUXpresso v10.0.2 build 411
In “Cycle Counting on ARM Cortex-M with DWT” I have used the ARM DWT register to count the executed cycles. With the MCUXpresso IDE comes with a very useful feature: it can capture the ARM SWO (Single Wire Output) trace data. One special kind of trace data is the ‘cycle counter’ information which is sent through SWO.
SWO Counters
I’m using Eclipse based IDE’s to develop and debug my embedded applications. This works great, as Eclipse has all the necessary tools to edit, build and debug it. But when it comes just to download/flash a binary to the board, then things are pretty much specific to the tools used. With the advent of the new MCUXpresso IDE, here is how that Eclipse IDE can be used for this.
LinkServer GUI Flash Programmer
One of the most important aspects of the ‘IoT’ world is having a secure communication. Running MQTT on lwip (see “MQTT with lwip and NXP FRDM-K64F Board“) is no exception. Despite of the popularity of MQTT and lwip, I have not been able to find an example using a secure TLS connection over raw/native lwip TCP :-(. Could it be that such an example exists, and I have not found it? Or that someone implemented it, but has not published it? Only what I have found on the internet are many others asking for the same kind of thing “running MQTT on lwip with TLS”, but there was no answer? So I have to answer my question, which seems to be a good thing anyway: I can learn new things the hard way :-).
Block diagram MQTT Application with TLS using lwip
In the area of IoT (Internet of Things), one obvious need is to have a way to send and receive data with an internet protocol. MQTT (or Message Queue Telemetry Transport) is exactly like that: a light-weight Machine-to-Machine communication protocol. With the MQTT protocol a microcontroller (or ‘client’) can send data and/or subscribe to data. For example to the Adafruit.IO:
Adafruit MQTT IO Feed
This is another article about the NXP MCUXpresso IDE (see “MCUXPresso IDE: Unified Eclipse IDE for NXPs ARM Cortex-M Microcontrollers“), this time it is about Post-build steps. Post-build steps are custom actions which can be executed after the build (or link phase), and are typically used to generate S-Record, Binary or Intel Hex files (see “S-Record, Intel Hex and Binary Files“).
Post Build Steps Details
There are many mergers going on in the industry, and one of the largest one was in 2016 the integration of Freescale Semiconductor with NXP Semiconductors, with both providing Eclipse based IDE’s to their customer base. Consequently, the company merger triggered a merger of the IDE’s, and last week NXP has released the result: the MCUXpresso IDE.
MCUXpresso IDE
This year I managed to attend the Embedded World in Nürnberg/Germany after missing the 2016 show. And 2017 has been a blast! With more than 1000 exhibitors and >30’000 visitors it was huge! There were too many exciting things, so I just pick a few: NXP demonstrated the new MCUXpresso Software and Tools with a new Eclipse Neon based IDE, lots of IoT and Hexiwear, the tiny LPC800-DIP board, and I have met Alan Hawse in person!
Impresson from the Show (embeddedworld 2017)
I’m pleased to announce that a new release of the McuOnEclipse components is available in SourceForge, with the following main features and changes:
SourceForge
