I had been evaluating ARM tools for some projects here at work.
I decide to try out the Olimex Programmer along with 2 Olimex boards (LPC 2103 and ADuC 7128). I have already evaluated the Keil and IAR tools with their dev boards, no problems, just expensive. I decided to try Crossworks with the OCD Tiny. Crossworks is great, the OCD tiny is not. Both PCBs work intermeittantly. Many lockups.
The soldering on the Olimex boards is horrible. I had to rework a couple pins on the chip as well as some resistors. Once I got the Cross Connect cable, things were better. Crossworks worked great with the non-olimex dev boards. Open OCD had trouble with connections as well
I have since then purchased the full-up Crossworks tools and got a couple CrossConnect modules…
The Olimex tools are all in the trash bin (literally). Waste of money for anything serious. It you have weeks to spend debugging the debugger it is ok but is definitely “Kitchen Table” quality.
I’m a bit confused… Are you saying that the 2 Olimex devel boards you purchased worked great with the IAR and Keil tools, but when you switched to crossconnect you started having intermittent connection problems? How can switching toolchains cause hardware issues?
I own 6 boards from olimex and had very few problems. The toolchain included with ARM-USB-OCD is not very up to date but you can easily download the latest YAGARTO release and trash the Olimex CD.
I’m a bit confused… Are you saying that the 2 Olimex devel boards you purchased worked great with the IAR and Keil tools, but when you switched to crossconnect you started having intermittent connection problems? How can switching toolchains cause hardware issues?
No, I have some Keil Eval boards that worked great with the Keil Tools.
The Rowley tools (Cross Connect) also worked great with the Keil Eval PCB.
The problem was the Olimex eval PCBs and OCD tiny. I could not get the OCD tiny to work reliably with any PCB it would consistently hang. The eval PCBs worked with the Cross Connect module after some PCB rework.
Have you contacted Olimex about the problems?
Leon
In years of reading avrfreaks.net, I cannot recall any complaints about quality at Olimex.
To the contrary.
ehughes:
The Rowley tools (Cross Connect) also worked great with the Keil Eval PCB.
The problem was the Olimex eval PCBs and OCD tiny. I could not get the OCD tiny to work reliably with any PCB it would consistently hang. The eval PCBs worked with the Cross Connect module after some PCB rework.
The FTDI-based debuggers suffer badly on synthesized parts, much moreso than hard core parts, which are getting thin on the ground. The fact is that you do need adaptive clocking on synthesized parts if you’re changing core frequencies dynamically. The FTDI modules are cheap, and can be fast downloading, are painful reading memory, and should really be handled with care.
We now have another CrossConnect in development that will blow the current CrossConnect and Segger J-link performance figures, and that is with adaptive clocking enabled. 
– Paul