ARM newbie, GNU toolset

Hi

I am looking at low cost 16/32 bit microcontrollers and naturally the ARM7 cored parts are good contenders. I’ve not decided which manufacturer, although NXP and Atmel seem popular.

I have seen there is a lot of interest in GNU based tools - for obvious reasons, and of course I share such interest. However there is also a dewildering choice of GNU based toolsets, and so I wondered what people on here had used, successfully?

My requirements are :-

  1. Ease of use/installation and stability. Doesn’t have to be cutting edge - does need to work!

  2. Good debugging support

  3. Not worried about Cortex support as yet.

What I don’t want to do is waste days or weeks, by making a bad choice.

As far as commercial offerings go, Rowley Crossworks has been recommended.

Apologies for a “newbie” post, but any advice would be most gratefully appreciated.

Regards

Rob

CrossWorks is based on GNU gcc, with their own excellent IDE and debugger. It works straight out of the box and support is good. A personal license is good value and will save you a lot of time. I use both the MSP430 and ARM versions.

Lots of people use the free tools successfully, of course.

Leon

leon_heller:
CrossWorks is based on GNU gcc, with their own excellent IDE and debugger. It works straight out of the box and support is good. A personal license is good value and will save you a lot of time. I use both the MSP430 and ARM versions.

Lots of people use the free tools successfully, of course.

Leon

IAR’s version that’s free has a fairly generous code size limit for the avocational user.

I preferred their compiler to GCC and Keil and CrossWorks is an IDE for GCC.

YAGARTO is a nice IDE for GCC for Windows.

Guys

Many thanks for your input, I feel like I have a good starting point now.

Regards

Rob

The toolsets really only give you a nice packaging and maybe an application or two. The GCC based toolchains still use GCC at their heart.

If you’re on Windows and looking for a pre-canned version, Yagarto is probably the most ‘up to date’ (vs WinARM). All include insight for graphical debugging. You get to pick your own editor - I suggest emacs (yes, I’m a long time software guy) or Notepad++.