I’m interested in doing some home development on my Mac, and to learn the ARM platform while I’m at it. I’m looking for a platform that has a GCC toolchain that will work on the Mac (or at least can be tweaked to work). My initial application will be a touchscreen IR remote, but I’ll eventually want to add other communication interfaces.
I’ve been looking really hard at the Beagleboard, but it seems like overkill for what I want to do (I’m not terribly interested in setting up an SBC or running Linux, although it might be interesting to toy with Android, I’m more interested in programming in C) and it seems like Mac development is a little kludge-y. Although there are some nice peripheral boards out there to add touchscreens for the Beagleboard, it gets expensive pretty fast. On the other hand, the sheer amount of expandability is pretty awesome.
If you follow Leon’s recommendation (we haven’t used Crossworks ourselves but haven’t heard anything but good things about it) they have some sample Rowley Crossworks code on their site. All that remains for you to locate is an IR device to interface with.
As for the development environment, I’m pretty comfortable with using the ARM GNU toolchain (since it’s free!) but I had some problems getting the environment built with the instructions here: http://www.ethernut.de/en/documents/cro … n-osx.html. I am going to try it with the gnuarm binaries tonight to see if these work out-of-the box. If that fails, I will try to work with the YAGARTO toolchain, which seems to be just an updated version of the ethernut one. Once I get this working, I was hoping to get it integrated into Eclipse, but one step at a time.
Is there a “standard” or JTAG debugger/programmer that’s popular with the ARM crowd? Seems like there are a TON of them and they all have different features - I just want one that covers the broadest amount of chips and will work with gdb.
After perusing the Beagleboard and other various ARM development board pages, it seems like most of them are focused on running full OSes. My main experience has been with micros (an AVR32 board interfacing with an MSP430 and another custom peripheral board), are there any ARM boards/products out there that aren’t used to run embedded OSes, and are more akin to application-specific development? I’m having a really hard time finding documentation (at least for the Beagleboard) that details the hardware control. It seems pretty much limited to using the 3rd stage bootloader for standing up a kernel; it seems like the only programmer’s reference is the Linux kernel source. All I really want to do is load my flashed application code and run it…
clarksonknight:
are there any ARM boards/products out there that aren’t used to run embedded OSes, and are more akin to application-specific development?
None of the fifteen or so LPC2xxx prototype / development boards that we directly support with Astrobe are running an OS and there are plenty of others. A list with links to the relevant vendor sites is here:
clarksonknight:
are there any ARM boards/products out there that aren’t used to run embedded OSes, and are more akin to application-specific development?
None of the fifteen or so LPC2xxx prototype / development boards that we directly support with Astrobe are running an OS and there are plenty of others. A list with links to the relevant vendor sites is here:
Since cfbsoftware.com says the LPC2106 is supported, you might add, to the Olimex list, the Olimex 2106 prototyping boards. I've used quite a number of these, due partly to the larger RAM and that one serial port is non-RS232.
It looks like I’m going to go with the Thai EasyElec Bluescreen, although I might wait until the SUN7 Bluescreen is available next month. I’ve hopefully built the proper toolchain to compile ARM binaries on my Mac with GCC 4.4.2, binutils 2.20.51, newlib 1.18.0 and gdb 7.1. I’m going to attempt to use OpenOCD with the ARM-USB-TINY-H JTAG debugger for programming the flash and debugging. Would be nice if I could integrate this all via Eclipse on my Mac, but one step at a time!
On a side note, I followed these instructions http://dirkraffel.com/2008/02/22/buildi … -mac-os-x/ to build and compile the toolchain, but used the latest versions of instead of the ones referenced. Missing from those instructions is that the latest GCC requires the installation of GMP and MPFR. I’ve yet to verify that I’m getting the proper ARM elf file, so I’m going to do some test program compilation to make sure.
clarksonknight:
It looks like I’m going to go with the Thai EasyElec Bluescreen, although I might wait until the SUN7 Bluescreen is available next month. I’ve hopefully built the proper toolchain to compile ARM binaries on my Mac with GCC 4.4.2, binutils 2.20.51, newlib 1.18.0 and gdb 7.1. I’m going to attempt to use OpenOCD with the ARM-USB-TINY-H JTAG debugger for programming the flash and debugging. Would be nice if I could integrate this all via Eclipse on my Mac, but one step at a time!
On a side note, I followed these instructions http://dirkraffel.com/2008/02/22/buildi … -mac-os-x/ to build and compile the toolchain, but used the latest versions of instead of the ones referenced. Missing from those instructions is that the latest GCC requires the installation of GMP and MPFR. I’ve yet to verify that I’m getting the proper ARM elf file, so I’m going to do some test program compilation to make sure.
Hi,
sry for re-opening this old thread.
@clarksonknight: can you pls let me know what tools you went with … I’m just starting with the ARM dev, on a Mac machine… would like to know what my options are and how to get the required tools… any references on getting started will be of great help too…
