Hi,
After all that talk about the serial ports it is time for me to start
looking for development tools for the LPC family.
I do not intend to start a "holly war" about which compiler is the best
but I really could use some help on that decision. I already have some
hardware I can start "playing" imediatelly. I have a Keil MBC2130 board, a
Embedded Artists LPC2138 quickstart board and 1 LPC2104 Color LCD Game with
bluetooth and a second one with integrated JTAG ! Lot's of hardware
available and no use yet :-(
I have about US$ 500 I can spend on development tools.. I usually do not
use ICE's at all !!! I am so used to debug using just a serial port that a
debug interface is not in my top priorities ! You can call me crazy but it
has worked for me for decades... I develop "incrementaly" and usually can
find the bugs faster than I can configure the ICE to look for it.. If the
debugger interface is nice and JTAG cheap maybe it is worthwhile.. But I do
not have a parallel port available on the Notebook....
Here are the options I already looked at... Any comments will be very
welcome.
Embedded Artists Quick Build GNUARM GCC environment.
WinArm
YARGATO with eclipse
Imagecraft Compiler and IDE
I love the large amount of available example code for GCC but really do
not like the makefiles and "linux style" of a infinite number of command
line options... You can call me lazy but I really prefer to just press a
button and have the code compiled and downloaded to the target :-) Do the
"skins" available for GCC make this almost as easy as a native windows IDE
?? And the price is right :-) I can spend the US$ 500 in other toys...
The Imagecraft Compiler sounds like a good option to me.. A nice IDE and
in every forum for the AVR and MSP430 Richard's support is said to be
excellent. The downsides that are obvious to me are that much less example
code is floating around and the package has no debugger.. I rarely resort to
a ICE but having one available is welcome when trouble gets too complex...
Does anyone uses this compiler ? Any comments on it ???
IAR and Keil are beyond my monetary possibilities at the moment...
Any comments will be greatly appreciated... I promise to get back to the
group with my impressions on the tool I end up using..
Best Regards,
Alexandre Guimaraes
Development Environment to start using the LPC2103.
Started by ●October 8, 2006
Reply by ●October 8, 20062006-10-08
> I love the large amount of available example code
for GCC but
really do
> not like the makefiles and "linux style" of a infinite number of
command
> line options... You can call me lazy but I really prefer to just
press a
> button and have the code compiled and downloaded to the target :-)
Do the
> "skins" available for GCC make this almost as easy as a native
windows IDE
> ?? And the price is right :-) I can spend the US$ 500 in other toys...
>
There are at least two ways of thinking about having the vendor
software make all the decisions: First, it flattens the learning
curve a little bit. But, second, it becomes a nightmare to figure how
to set the options you really need. Automatically included vendor
specific configuration files, among other things, limits the
portability of the code and obscures the process.
Now, some of these vendor packages are wrappers around GCC. At least
the libraries are standard. So, what you have is an expensive way to
get a makefile written.
As to the IDE, there are many. I have used Eclipse with the gnuarm
package and lpc21isp for the downloader and it works very well. It
really is a 'point and click' approach for $0. Oh, and I have used it
on Windows XP and Linux. There is no difference other than file paths
in the makefile - and those are usually transparent unless you do
something to move files out of standard locations.
Makefiles get to be 'cookie cutter' things after a short while. You
will find one that is easy to comprehend and modify it over time so
that it becomes more generic and easily portable. In fact, my ARM
makefile started out as an AVR makefile that I got from some code at
BDMicro (www.bdmicro.com), I believe. As to all the options: well,
you probably won't need to deal with them very often. You will copy
CFLAGS from somebody's makefile and call it a day - until you have a
problem. Then it's off to the manual...
The only other file that needs to be created is the linker script. I
am still using the one from the famous James Lynch Tutorial.
In fact, I can't say enough about that tutorial. Everything necessary
to get started is explained in great detail. Sure, it focuses on the
LPC2106 and touches on the LPC2148 but the concepts should apply to a
wide range of processors.
Richard
really do
> not like the makefiles and "linux style" of a infinite number of
command
> line options... You can call me lazy but I really prefer to just
press a
> button and have the code compiled and downloaded to the target :-)
Do the
> "skins" available for GCC make this almost as easy as a native
windows IDE
> ?? And the price is right :-) I can spend the US$ 500 in other toys...
>
There are at least two ways of thinking about having the vendor
software make all the decisions: First, it flattens the learning
curve a little bit. But, second, it becomes a nightmare to figure how
to set the options you really need. Automatically included vendor
specific configuration files, among other things, limits the
portability of the code and obscures the process.
Now, some of these vendor packages are wrappers around GCC. At least
the libraries are standard. So, what you have is an expensive way to
get a makefile written.
As to the IDE, there are many. I have used Eclipse with the gnuarm
package and lpc21isp for the downloader and it works very well. It
really is a 'point and click' approach for $0. Oh, and I have used it
on Windows XP and Linux. There is no difference other than file paths
in the makefile - and those are usually transparent unless you do
something to move files out of standard locations.
Makefiles get to be 'cookie cutter' things after a short while. You
will find one that is easy to comprehend and modify it over time so
that it becomes more generic and easily portable. In fact, my ARM
makefile started out as an AVR makefile that I got from some code at
BDMicro (www.bdmicro.com), I believe. As to all the options: well,
you probably won't need to deal with them very often. You will copy
CFLAGS from somebody's makefile and call it a day - until you have a
problem. Then it's off to the manual...
The only other file that needs to be created is the linker script. I
am still using the one from the famous James Lynch Tutorial.
In fact, I can't say enough about that tutorial. Everything necessary
to get started is explained in great detail. Sure, it focuses on the
LPC2106 and touches on the LPC2148 but the concepts should apply to a
wide range of processors.
Richard
