Tag Archives: Tips&Tricks

About things you might not know, or could make your life easier.

Tutorial: USB CDC with the KL25Z Freedom Board

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Question: What to do on a rainy Sunday?
Answer: Having fun with USB and the KL25Z Freedom board! :-).

In “A shell for the Freedom board” I used the UART-to-USB OpenSDA capability of the KL25Z Freedom board: The KL25Z processor uses the OpenSDA K20 microprocessor as Serial-to-USB converter. But this only works because of the P&E OpenSDA USB CDC (Communication Device Class) implementation. If I create my board without OpenSDA, I need a different approach: I want to do USB CDC with the KL25Z :twisted:.

USB CDC Device on COM22

USB CDC Device on COM22

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Compiler Defines and Eclipse Editor Highlighting

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In this post I have found settings for Eclipse Indexer to show the state if defines correctly. Usually I have something like this in my projects:

debug me

debug me

So I define the macro DEBUG_ME on the compiler command line. And it is cool to see that the Eclipse editor correctly grays out the code which is not enabled. But for this the Eclipse Editor view needs to know about the macro, but how does this work?

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Processor Expert, gcc C++ and Kinetis-L with MQXLite

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The Kinetis-L is a 32bit microprocessor family, based on ARM Cortex M0+. It comes with ARM gcc in CodeWarrior. Although the Kinetis-L does not have much RAM, it is very possible to use gcc with C++, especially as a programmer I keep the limited RAM amount in mind. So I thought I try C++ and Processor Expert for my Kinetis-L KL25Z Freedom board.

If I select C++ as language in the New Bareboard Project Wizard of CodeWarrior, then I cannot select Processor Expert or Device Initialization:

C++ in the New Project Wizard

C++ in the New Project Wizard

That makes somewhat sense, as Processor Expert creates normal C code and C files, but no C++. Still, what if I need C++? This is doable, but with anything advanced, I need to know exactly what I want and what I do. Here is the ‘How to use C++ with Processor Expert’.

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White Space or not, that’s the question

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There are times when I want to know *exactly* what is inside my source files. In my article on EHEP explains how to get down to the hex bytes of a source file. But in many cases I’m interested to see the non printable/white characters only. Showing white spaces in the sources is easy in Eclipse: I use the ‘Show Whitespace Characters‘ toolbar icon:

Show Whitespace Characters

Show Whitespace Characters

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S-Record, Intel Hex and Binary Files

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My earlier posts were around the Kinetis gcc compiler which comes with CodeWarrior for MCU10.3. MCU10.3 comes as well with the Freescale Kinetis compiler as in MCU10.2. In “S-Record Generation with gcc for ARM/Kinetis” I explored how to generate S19 or other output files with gcc. However, you only can produce one file format at a time. What if I need multiple formats or a different format. What if I need to do the same with non-gcc build tools? S-Records are usually easy as supported in the linker. Other formats need a bit more plumbing. So this post is how I can create and manipulate the different output formats, so I can use it with a bootloader.

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Code Size Information with gcc for ARM/Kinetis

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Working with the Freescale S08 and S12 build tools, there is something I really appreciated: that the linker reports on the console the code size of the application:

S08 Linker reporting the code size

S08 Linker in Eclipse reporting the code size

This is especially handy as it allows you to see the impact on code size immediately e.g. if I change a compiler option or do a source code change. Simple and easy. Yes, I could get that kind of information from the linker map file too. But this means I need to open that file, scroll down/etc: many steps just to find out the code size.

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Spaces vs. Tabs in Eclipse

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I admit: I’m a ‘space’ person. What I mean is that I prefer ‘spaces’ over ‘tabs’ in my source code. Why? Because I don’t want to relay on the tab width, and I prefer to use ‘two spaces for an intention level’.

I would assume that maybe half of the world is for spaces, and half of the world is for tabs. I don’t want to cause a religious war here. I’m for freedom of choice, and this is what Eclipse and CodeWarrior for MCU (which is Eclipse based) offers. Now as I have outed myself as a ‘spacer’, and given the fact that CodeWarrior comes as ‘tabser’ by default, this is something I have to change as a setting for my workspace. Here is what I do….

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S-Record Generation with gcc for ARM/Kinetis

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With my Freedom KL25Z board I’m using the GNU/gcc build tools and Eclipse/CodeWarrior. When I wanted to create an S19 file of my application using the GNU tools, this was not that easy to find out. So here are the steps to do this:

I open the project setting using the menu Project > Properties and go to C/C++ Build > Settings > Additional Tools and enable’Create Flash Image‘:

Additional Tools gcc Settings

Additional Tools gcc Settings

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