On Sat, 2004-09-11 at 00:48, K. Ghosh wrote: > On Fri, 10 Sep 2004 17:46:53 +0530 > jpm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Hi: > > I will bring a colleague, Madhukar Bhat, who is an expert on Eclipse > > and he configured my Eclipse for use with gnu-arm. > > I will also bring my small ARM Embedded board, to show our friends > > what a cute small processor it is and how it could be used with a > > Linux platform as your development box. > > See you all on Saturday 10.30 AM > > J.P. Mathew > > Mr.Mathew, > > I am interested in your ARM Embedded board + Linux, > can I ask you to send some details (off list ?) > Regards, > > -- K.Ghosh I believe many engineers working on Embedded Systems, may be interested on this subject. So here is what I did to create my choice development platform for ARM. 1. I had some previous experience with ARM Cross tools while working on a Simputer. At that time I had created a complete cross tool chain. What I had lacked was a detailed understanding of the ARM internals and how to debug ARM programs. 2. I needed an economical development platform for simple testing of programs. Simputer was too expensive. So I got one Olimex board based on Philips lpc2106 using ARM 32 bit TDMI processor with a lot of other peripherals. In fact it is ideal for a simple embedded system. 3. All the Development Board and Software Vendors give C compilers and debugging software for $500 and above range. What bugged me is that all these are available only on MS platform. Some give with cygwin but still only on MS. This again is too expensive for a beginner just to learn these systems. So I went about collecting the tools on Linux platform. 4. For compiling ARM Interrupt Handlers using gcc we need gcc 3.4. I Compiled the set from sources. But I found that the binary distribution from gnuarm is correct (just make sure it is 3.4). I had problems with arm-elf-insight Version 6.1, even though the arm-elf-gdb worked OK. So I got the Version 6.0 sources and compiled them. Now I added this debug tools to my toolchain. 5. Now I could compile simple programs and test it using the arm-elf-insight using the target as simulator. Often we need to see all the GP Registers and memory(specially the stack) while debugging. So using the plain gdb is a waste of time, while insight gives multiple views for the registers and memory and another window for the assembler code itself. 6. I connected my Olimex board using a serial cable from my Linux box and send the object code to the target and flashed the program. Since I have an LCD display also on the Olimex board, I could display useful information. A nice simple program I wrote could take the Philips boot code from flash and display it in hex on the lcd. This was very useful as I wanted to learn how certain functions like ISP(In System Programming) and IAP (In Application Programming) are implemented by Philips and they don't give the boot code (it is confidential!!). Later I used this hex dump and patched a previously compiled code. I did the arm-elf-objdump to get the assembler code. This was fast and useful, manually decoding from hex to assembler took me 20 min for one instruction!! 7. Finally with Madhukar's help I got my Eclipse configured to use arm-elf-insight and all the other gcc components as external components. This again I learned from the net where someone had configured Eclipse using MS and Cygwin, when I asked him how I could configure it on Linux, he said, he does not have a Linux platform. Now I have a full fledged IDE (Eclipse), the gnu tools and the debugger working. Now I am writing the notes on this...drawing the ARM architecture using xfig took some time... I hope to complete it soon.
I feel this is an ideal tool for anyone wanting to get a foothold on Embedded Systems using ARM. The costly tools are great and may be even necessary to go full fledged debugging using JTAG. (I have not yet tested my JTAG cable using Linux box). For a new Engineer it may take a full six months before she becomes an expert on Assembler and C for the target board. It took me sometime to understand the Vectored Interrupt Controller on this chip..if these aspects could be learned before you make major investments in development tools, it will mean a profitable project!! If anyone needs more info on this subject send me a mail. Cheers, jpm -------------------------------------------------------------- DPS INDIA PRIVATE LTD., CALCUTTA, INDIA -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body "unsubscribe ilug-cal" and an empty subject line. FAQ: http://www.ilug-cal.org/node.php?id=3
