For systematic debugging, an engineer needs a debug probe. For the Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040) device there are plenty of debug options with VS Code.
In this article I show different options, from professional tools to DIY solutions and the settings in VS Code I’m using.
Continue readingWith semihosting I can use standard I/O function like printf() and I can read and write data on the host through the debug connection. If used with care, this is a great feature especially for unit testing.
Developing for an embedded target means using a certain version of GNU compiler, debugger and other tools. The challenge gets bigger if working with multiple different tool chains and environments.
Conda is package, dependency and environment management tool. While it is heavily used for Python and Data Science development, it is surprisingly working very well to set up and managing environments for embedded development. Conda is great for managing non-Python dependencies and setups.
Continue readingIn my previous article I showed how to import, build and debug MCUXpresso SDK projects in VS Code. In my lectures and labs we are using a robot based on the NXP Kinetis K22FX512 ARM Cortex-M4F microcontroller, and there is only the v2.13.0 SDK available.
The software on the robot uses the latest NXP MCUXpresso SDK v2.3.1. The he Eclipse based MCUXpresso IDE 11.8.0 works fine with all the 2.x SDKs, up to the latest 2.13.0 one.
Continue readingWe have a project imported, have built it, time to debug it on the hardware.
After having imported the repository with the SDK, it is now time to create a first project.
In a previous article I have installed the MCUXpresso extension and used the MCUXpresso Installer to install the necessary development tools.
In this article I’m going to import the SDK.
“There is no such thing as a free lunch.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch
And this applies to VS Code and many of its extensions. You agree to the licensing conditions, and you pay with your data.
VS Code source code is MIT licensed, but the binaries you can download and install have telemetry built in: you are giving Microsoft your usage data in return for using VS Code.
If you are concerned about this, and looking for free and libre open source binaries of VS Code, then have a look at MIT-Licensed VSCodium.
This is the beginning of an article series about Visual Studio Code. The first step is to download and install it.
MCU on Eclipse 