New kit on the blog

At the last Embedded World show it was Cortex-M3 everywhere and I discovered that Fujitsu (now?) also sells cheapish development kits for their Cortex-M3 products. I obtained one of these kits, the SK-FM3-100PMC, to check out. The kit contains an SK-FM3-100PMC board, an AB type USB cable, a CDROM and a sheet with additional information. It does not contain the promised CD/DVD with Softune Workbench mentioned in the additional information.

On the board you’ll find an MB9BF506N processor (100 pins, 80 MHz, 512 KB flash, 64 KB RAM, 8 multifunction serial ports, 2 CAN ports & USB host & device, plus of course the usual timers and PWM-like peripherals, DMA and what not). Available connectors are UART-A RS-232 (9-pin female subd), UART-B USB (type A), CAN (9-pin male subd), USB host, USB device (type A), 20-pin JTAG (as usual the wrong way around for my Keil pod, Keil even gets this wrong on their own boards. Actually the cable is upside down on the pod) & Trace and headers for all the processor’s pins. On-board gadgets are two 7-segment LED displays (I always like that) and two square white push buttons.

The board can be powered from a multitude of sources: externally feeding a 1117 5V regulator, JTAG and both USB-A connectors. The processor itself will work from 2.7V up to 5.5V, meaning that this is one of the rare Cortex-M3 devices that can run directly from 5V.



Lets go!
Insert the CDROM and connect the board to the PC using the UART-B connector. A pretty well written Readme file pops up that guides you through the process of setting up a development environment for the kit. Driver installation is very easy, Windows can do it all alone (except for the usual “Do you really want to do this?” nagging). When the board is powered the 7-segment display starts counting up to 99 and then stops. Pressing the INT0 push-button makes it count down to 00, pressing INT1 makes it count up again.

The readme also describes how everything should be packed in the box, which is cool if you want to put it away properly.

The board has a reset LED, interesting. It lights up when you press the (square blue) reset button. Such an LED is maybe helpful to detect situations where the board is kept in reset without you wanting to?

The CDROM contains a free serial port terminal program SKwizard. This utility only knows about four COM ports, when my board is on COM20… Luckily the flash programming tool FM3 can handle COM ports up to nr. 20 (phew…). Yes, I know you can assign a different number to a virtual COM port, but this is poor/old school programming. The other flash programming tool (there are two) allows port numbers up to 255.

To test ease of (re)programming the board I first tried the FM3 flash tool. This one uses the serial port for programming and is pretty straightforward to use. The only weird thing (besides the COM port numbers) is that the file picker wants an S-record file, but only knows the extensions MHX, CNV & AHX, and not the SREC files that come with the kit.

The second tool for direct USB programming over the USB device port is a bit more difficult to get started, because it needs a driver that is not on the CDROM and I could not find it on the Fujitsu website either. Contacting Fujitsu taught me that the driver is hidden in the installation folder of the Flash USB Direct tool (on my PC: c:\Program Files\Fujitsu\FUJITSU USB DIRECT Programmer\driver\). I was also told that no drivers are available yet for Windows 7, but they are coming. Once the driver installed (COM 22!), I could reprogram the board. To my surprise direct USB programming turned out to be as slow (or fast, but I prefer slow in this case) as serial port programming. However, I did like the friendly message after successful programming: “It ended normally completely”. (Probably to be pronounced with a Japanese accent.)

Example code is provided for IAR and Keil compilers. I did have Keil uVision 3 with a ULINK2 pod, but you need version 4 to open the project files, so I downloaded & installed an upgrade of 312 MB. Now with my brand new version 4 I could indeed open the example projects.

What the people at Fujitsu forgot to mention is that you have to copy the examples to your hard disk otherwise uVision will not be able to build them as it tries to create files in the project folder. More annoying is that they also did not mention that you have to manually select the device - for some reason the project does not include the device – otherwise you cannot flash the board after a build and you receive confusing error messages. So, before building a project, select the device: Project -> Options for Target, click on the Device tab and select the MB9BF506N. This will also load the correct flash algorithm file. Now build the project and load it in the processor with your ULINK2, ME or PRO pod.

If you look closely at the project files you will see a file named FLASH_DEBUG_README.txt. This file says that you should copy an FLM file from the project to the Keil environment, but it seems that uVision 4 already contains usable flash files that get loaded when you select the target device.

I could not try trace recording, because you need a ULINK Pro for that.


The board in a Keil uVision 4 / ULINK2 environment.

Now that I am finally ready to start developing for this board it is a shame to discover that there doesn’t seem to be a nice Fujitsu library encapsulating all the peripherals of the chip and the board; some sort of a BSP as people like to call it nowadays. The best they have come up with is an empty template project, a bit meager.

Documentation includes full schematics of the board, but it is lacking a mechanical drawing with the positions of the break-out connectors that seem to be placed on a convenient 0.1 inch grid. So measure carefully when you design an extension card for it.

Open4 EvoPrimer

In the previous post I mentioned the Open World Design Contest launched by ST and others. The participants who make it into the second round will get free development tools, notably the EvoPrimer platform.

This platform is actually a very interesting set of tools developed by Raisonance under the name of Open4 (read as “Open for …”). The system is very open indeed and schematics and source code can be downloaded for free. A system consists of a base, a kind of multimeter-sized pod, and target boards that slide into the pod. The base offers the human interface like a color touch screen, a joystick, buttons, LEDs, audio I/O, IrDA, accelerometer and a li-ion battery with charger, the target board offers the applications.


Open 4 dissection...

Several target boards are available, with 8-bit and 32-bit processors from ST, but you can also develop your own. When you open the base you get access to a connector for extension cards that can slide through an opening under de joystick (if you remove the cover). This connector is the main way to go for those who want to add something to the system.

Software development is done with the Ride7 IDE, also from Raisonance, using GCC. The free version lets you compile and flash any size of code and debug executables of up to 32 KB. You have to pay for unlimited debugging. The IDE connects directly to the base through a USB port, without the need for additional programming or debugging pods. Ride7 also offers an ARM simulator.

Instead of writing all the GUI code yourself, you should (but you are not obliged to) built your application on CircleOS. It is not clear to me who the owner is of this OS, but the main thing is that it is free and open source software. CircleOS handles the display, the touch screen and all other hardware that is built in the EvoPrimer base. It also calls the user application on a regular basis and it lets the application interact with the OS to obtain button states etc. Applications are stored in a special memory area and there is room for several of them. The OS will allow the user to select the application from a menu. The application memory available depends on the target board you are using.


Ride7 is a nice IDE indeed!

Although Raisonance and their tools seem to concentrate on microcontrollers from ST, the Ride7 IDE can also be used for ARM-based controllers from other brands. It happily supports many NXP and TI (Luminary) models and if you look in the Ride7 installation folders you will find more supported processors than that the IDE lets you choose from. If you don’t like Eclipse (who does?) and if you don’t mind debugging the hard way, this is a very nice IDE for ARM development. My next Sceptre project will probably be done using this IDE.

Oh, did I mention the price of an EvoPrimer kit? About 100 euros for a base with target board!

2011 OpenWorld Design Contest

OpenWorld is an interesting design contest launched this week by STMicroelectronics and a bunch of industrial and research partners. The OpenWorld application design contest is a “technology promotion engaged by the Autonomie project” with as goal the development of “advanced navigation and augmented reality applications to assist the handicapped”.

The contest is based on the EvoPrimer tools that target especially portable applications. On the Embedded World show I saw a nifty extension card for the EvoPrimer that should allow for some pretty impressive personal in-house dead reckoning. The board was not only capable of tracking horizontal movements, but it also measures vertical displacements so it can help track a person going up and down the stairs. With such hardware some cool augmented reality (I should say this more often: augmented reality, augmented reality) applications should be possible.



To enter the contest and win some of the $ 20.000 cash awards you have to submit a proposition on the theme of Technology for Human Assistance. The best application concepts win EvoPrimer tools and enter the second phase to actually transform the concept into a working prototype.

Meet the people behind LPCXpresso

OK, I admit it, I have been talking quite a lot about LPCXpresso lately. Why? Because I like NXP's concept of handing out free tools (did you know that they did it again? Get a board for free just by answering some questions on their website), but I also have become a fan of the little LPC Cortex-M0 and M3 devices. At the Embedded World 2011 show I visited of course the NXP booth and there I was introduced to the brains behind the LPCXpresson concept. My boss, who came with me, always carries a photo camera and immediately took some pictures, so now you too can meet the LPCXpresso team.



On the left we have Jan Jaap Bezemer who tries to sell (or should I say "give away") the NXP microcontrollers. Second from the left, Rob Cosaro, and the man on the right, Joe Yu, are the people that came up with LPCXpresso. A chuckling Rob told me that he was very much amused by the fact that people are indeed cutting of the LPC-Link part of the board, something that was never really intended. Apparently some people cloning the board add a V-groove to make separating the parts easier.

Embedded World 2011 - Cortex-M3 everywhere

This year I renewed my visit to the Embedded World show in Nuremburg, Germany. Walking around the four halls that make up this big show it was simply impossible not to notice the ARM Cortex-M3 based controllers all around. Most chip manufacturers showed off boards with Cortex M3 devices, including ARM itself with their mbed board and other dev boards. There were also some Cortex-M4 demo's around from f.i. NXP (LPC4300) and Freescale (Kinetis).

This show was also rich in free kits; especially ST was very generously handing out STM32 and STM8 kits. I did not accept all of them, because I have no idea what to do with ‘em. Yet I did leave with (amongst others) a BeagleBoard-xM (thank you TI!), an FTDI Vinculo that I will review later on this blog and a ZigBee kit from ST. Fujitsu promised me to send me a Cortex-M3 kit by mail, I wonder if it will ever arrive.

Update 18/3: I received today a Fujitsu SK-FM3-100PMC kit, nicely boxed. More about it, hopefully soon, on this blog.

Due to a rather large amount of business meetings I did not see a whole lot of new or exciting things this year. However, I did get a demo of the very impressive new PIC32 compiler from MikroElektronika. These guys are definitely setting the new comfort standards for embedded software development. Wow! I always liked Microsoft’s Visual Studio, but this is way, way better. And the good news is that they are planning an ARM compiler too! At just under $300 (or $200 if you buy a board too) this is a bargain.

While I’m on compilers, Atmel too presented a new one: AVR Studio 5. This is a great tool too, and toujours completely free. V5 brings together AVR Studio 4 and AVR32 Studio into one IDE. It also integrates the AVR Software Framework (ASF) and over 400 example projects that used to be all over their website. Now you just pick your board and then the example that comes closest to what you want to do and off you go.

From the chip front I would like to mention the new ultra low-power 32-bit micro-controller family from Renesas, the RL78. Besides being low-power, this family is also ultra low-dollar. With an operating current of only 70 µA/MHz this is a direct competitor for the MSP430 from TI. But TI told me that they will announce an ultra-ultra-low-power MSP family later this year that will blow away the competition.
Microchip proudly announced their new PIC18F K80 micro. This is an 8-bit device that costs over one dollar, even at high quantities. This nicely illustrates the 8/32 bit paradox, but both Atmel and Microchip expect that the 8-bit market will continue to grow.

That is was not only Cortex-M3 all around proved Digi who had on display their pretty impressive ConnectCore Wi-i.MX51. As Digi's website says: "This module is a highly integrated and future-proof System-on-Module (SoM) solution based on the Freescale i.MX51 application processor with a high performance 600/800 MHz ARM Cortex-A8 core, powerful multimedia capabilities and a complete set of peripherals.".



The kit on the left is running Android, the kit at the right runs Ubuntu.
Digi's latest board, the ConnectCore Wi-i.MX53, was on display at the Freescale stand.
Rabbit 6000 modules are now available too.

Analog Devices showed me their new MEMS gyroscopes that have extremely low drift. So, I guess this is good news for the dead reckoning people.

FTDI presented a rather mysterious device, the FT1248. Although they did make it clear that this device communicates over a 1, 2, 4 or 8 bit wide bus of which the width can be adjusted on the fly, I did not grasp the reason of being of this chip. It is probably very useful or they wouldn’t have spent any time on it, but useful for what exactly? I guess that it is a bus extender of some sort, but I can’t find the data-sheet. Oh well, I am sure someone will figure this out for me.

I really like this show; I can hardly wait for next year.

Free cup of LPCXpresso!

A bit over two weeks ago I told you how to get a free LPCXpresso board by making a short video or a photograph of how you got rid of your 8/16 bits micro-controller. I suspect/suppose that NXP will honor every participant.

Here is a picture I received from Antoine Broussal. Note how he did the can and the peanuts.



Just to show you that it is not bogus, here is a picture of the board with its accompanying letter that I received this morning by UPS. It is, as I expected, an LPC1114 board.



Denis Xavier wrote me to tell me that his contribution was accepted too, so Denis, you want to share a cup of LPCXpresso code?

The campaign is still running and the submission stream seems to have slowed down a bit, so go give it a shot yourself!

Embedded World 2011 update: NXP ran out of stock. Please be patient.

BTW, while I was writing this, I received a press release from NXP announcing the LPC1200 series. Compared to the other LPC Cortex-M0 devices these new Cortex-M0 controllers offer up to 128 KB of flash memory, DMA, a real-time clock (RTC) and a CRC engine.

CodeLite & GDB for ARM

Just after finishing the Elektor article about how to debug the Sceptre (or any other microcontroller that can be debugged over JTAG) using OpenOCD and GDB, I discovered another free IDE that seemed to be good for embedded development: CodeLite. It seemed to have everything needed for this kind of work, so I planned to add a supplement to the article on this blog. I thought that it would be easy to port the setup described in the article to this new IDE, but unfortunately it turned out to be not so. To come straight to the point: I have not succeeded debugging my target using CodeLite with GDB and OpenOCD.

Why? Because CodeLite does not treat GDB well or I am to dumb to figure it out. It seems easy & intuitive enough though. You create a project and then you define a debug setup for the project. You can tell CodeLite where your debugger lives and which commands to execute and CodeLite offers a GDB terminal, so everything is there to make it work. Except that it won't.

There are several issues. One is that it doesn't work always the same way. Sometimes I had to pass through the Quick Debug option to get it more or less going, sometimes this was not necessary. The reset command that I specified to be executed after attaching to the target gets executed several times instead of just once as if CodeLite uses a very short timeout to wait for response and then simply tries again. If it manages to get a connection to OpenOCD it is very difficult to use the GDB terminal that most of the times returns a message "interrupting debugee process: xxxx" where xxxx is a number that corresponds to the PC's process ID of GDB. Very frustrating and in the end I gave up, not succeeding once to execute successfully a step command.

It is a shame, because the IDE is nice. Not as heavy as Eclipse-CDT and easy to set up for embedded software development. It has interesting plugins, like the code formatting option that you can setup the way you like it, or a copyright block inserter. A snippet wizard lets you write quickly and you can hide functions that you don't want to see, it has everything you expect from a modern IDE. Therefore I suggest that you give it a try, maybe you don't care for GDB debugging of embedded platforms, it is definitely worth it.

If by any chance you figure out how to get GDB and OpenOCD working properly in CodeLite, please let me know.