Tag Archives: software

Tutorial: How to Optimize Code and RAM Size

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It is great if vendors provide a starting point for my own projects. A working ‘blinky’ is always a great starter. Convenience always has a price, and with a ‘blinky’ it is that the code size for just ‘toggling a GPIO pin’ is exaggerated. For a device with a tiny amount of RAM and FLASH this can be concerning: will my application ever fit to that device if a ‘blinky’ takes that much? Don’t worry: a blinky (or any other project) can be easily trimmed down.

Binky on NXP LPC845-BRK Board

Binky on NXP LPC845-BRK Board

I use a ‘blinky’ project here just as an example: the trimming tips can apply to any other kind of projects too.

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Restoring Default Firmware on Seeed Arch Mix NXP i.MX RT1052 Board

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In my previous article “Debug and Execute Code from FLASH on the Seeed Arch Mix NXP i.MX RT1052 Board” I explained how to take complete control over the board and flash and debug a firmware. Of course this overwrites the one which comes by default shipped on the board. This article is about how to restore or update the original firmware.

Restored Seeed Firmware

Restored Seeed Firmware

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Debug and Execute Code from FLASH on the Seeed Arch Mix NXP i.MX RT1052 Board

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In my previous article “Seeed Studio Arch Mix NXP i.MX RT1052 Board” I described how I can use and debug the Seeed Arch Mix Board. But so far I only had things running in RAM. Ultimately I want to use the QSPI FLASH memory on the device with my firmware and running code on it. This article shows how to get from RAM execution to SPI FLASH in-place execution (XiP).

Seeed Arch Mix NXP i.MX RT1052 Board

Seeed Arch Mix NXP i.MX RT1052 Board

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New NXP MCUXpresso Eclipse IDE v11.0

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A few days ago NXP has released a new version of their Eclipse IDE flagship: the MCUXpresso IDE v11.0.

NXP MCUXpresso IDE V11.0.0

NXP MCUXpresso IDE V11.0.0

The previous v10.3.1 was released back in Feb 2019, and the 11.0 now in June this year matches up with the Fall university semester. I appreciate that the releases are about every 6 months, so this gives me time to use it in my university lecture material and lab work. I had the weekend for trying it out, and I’m very pleased.

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SWO with NXP i.MX RT1064-EVK Board

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With the cost of an single pin, many ARM Cortex-M boards including the NXP i.MX RT1064 can produde SWO data: think about a pin able to stream data out of the chip in realtime. For example interrupt activity which otherwise might be hard to capture:

SWO Interrupt Trace

SWO Interrupt Trace

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Reverse Engineering of a Not-so-Secure IoT Device

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The ‘Internet of Things’ is coming! It started as an overused marketing hype with no real use case (who needs internet connected fridges? Who wants the internet connected toilet paper?).

New ‘things’ start to pop up, useful or not: From smart bulbs (Philips Hue), thermostats (Nest), smart TV (Samsung and others) up to voice assistants (Alexa, Cortana, Google). You might even have installed one of these, right? What about temperature and humidity sensors? Probably there is nothing wrong with that?

But what would you think if one morning you find a strange unknown device installed under your working desk, connected to the cloud and internet?

IoT Device attached under a working desk

IoT Device attached under a working desk

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MCUXpresso Eclipse IDE Mouse Tips & Tricks

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In a modern development workflow both command-line and a graphical user interface has its place. On the GUI side, Eclipse is famous that it offers many different ways to accomplish something which is great. But sometimes I continue to use an old habit or way because I have missed that there is a newer and better way, and the MCUXpresso Eclipse IDE is no exception to that. In this article I show a few ways how to use the mouse even more productive.

Project Settings

Project Settings

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Tutorial: MCUXpresso SDK with Linux, Part 3: RAM and XiP Code on i.MX RT1064

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In my previous articles I have used the command line on Linux to build and debug NXP MCUXpresso SDK applications. In this article I’m running code on NXP i.MX RT1064 in RAM or FLASH.

i.MXRT1064 board with LPC845-BRK as debug probe

i.MXRT1064 board with LPC845-BRK as debug probe

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Internal and External Debug Options for the NXP LPC55S69-EVK Board

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The LPC55S69-EVK board comes on-board debug probe. The board includes the LPC4322JET100 device which acts like NXP LPC-Link2 debug probe:

LPC4322JET100 on LPC55S69-EVK

LPC4322JET100 on LPC55S69-EVK

But it is easily possible to use the board with an external debug probe or re-program the onboard one as a SEGGER J-Link debug probe.

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

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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:

  1. Excessive writes to the SD card can wear it out
  2. 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

Raspberry Pi with UPS System and tinyK22

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

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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

LPC55S69 Microcontroller

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Tutorial: MCUXpresso SDK with Linux, Part 2: Commandline Debugging with GDB

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In “Tutorial: MCUXpresso SDK with Linux, Part 1: Installation and Build with Maked” I used cmake and make to build the SDK application. In this part I’m going to use the command line gdb to debug the application on the board.

Cross-Debugging with GDB

Cross-Debugging with GDB

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Tutorial: MCUXpresso SDK with Linux, Part 1: Installation and Build with Make

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I admit: my work laptop machine is running a Windows 10 OS by default. But this does not prevent me running Linux in a Virtual Machine (VM). Each host platform has its benefits, and I don’t feel biased to one or the other, but I have started using Ubuntu more and more, simply because I have worked more on Embedded Linux projects. While I have used mostly Windows with Eclipse for NXP LPC, Kinetis and i.MX platforms in the past, I started using Ubuntu too from last year with the NXP MCUXpresso SDK. I did not find much documentation about this on the web, so I thought it might be a good idea to write a tutorial about it. So here we go…

Building NXP MCUXpresso SDK on Linux Ubuntu

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Be aware: Floating Point Operations on ARM Cortex-M4F

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My mantra is *not* to use any floating point data types in embedded applications, or at least to avoid them whenever possible: for most applications they are not necessary and can be replaced by fixed point operations. Not only floating point operations have numerical problems, they can lead to performance problems as in the following (simplified) example:

#define NOF  64
static uint32_t samples[NOF];
static float Fsamples[NOF];
float fZeroCurrent = 8.0;

static void ProcessSamples(void) {
  int i;

  for (i=0; i<NOF; i++) {
    Fsamples[i] = samples[i]*3.3/4096.0 - fZeroCurrent;
  }
}

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Running FreeRTOS on the VEGA RISC-V Board

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In “Debugging the RV32M1-VEGA RISC-V with Eclipse and MCUXpresso IDE” I described how to build and debug applications for the VEGA RISC-V board. In this article I describe how to enable FreeRTOS for RISC-V, based on the latest FreeRTOS V10.2.0 release.

Blinky with FreeRTOS on the VEGA RISC-V Board

Blinky with FreeRTOS on the VEGA RISC-V Board

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Remote Debugging with USB based JTAG/SWD Debug Probes

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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

IP Based Debugging with USB Debug Probe

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Contributing an IoT LoRaWAN Raspberry Pi RAK831 Gateway to The Things Network

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LoRa and LoRaWAN is getting the de-facto wireless IoT network in my area. No surprise that traditional telecom providers like Swisscom trying to monetize the ‘Internet of Things’ area. Luckily there is an open and free alternative: https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/. Volunteers, enthusiasts and members in the different TTN communities build gateways and offer free LoRaWAN network access. I wanted to contribute to that grassroots movement with building my gateway, providing LoRaWAN access to my neighborhood.

LoRaWAN TheThingsNetwork Gateway

LoRaWAN TheThingsNetwork Gateway

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MCUXpresso IDE V10.3.1 available

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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

MCUXpresso 10.3.1 About Information

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Different Ways of Software Configuration

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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 tinK22 with OLED LCD

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

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

stopped in main

stopped in main

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

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