Setting up an ARM toolchain - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / beginners

author: senso
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 25, 2010, 03:23:43 am
content: Goodnight to everyone, I'm actually interested in using the great ARM chips, and I have actually two ARM boards, one LPCXpresso 1768 and one STM32 Discovery, but as usual all the compilers for this chips are always evaluation versions, limited in code size, optimization and some things more, but they are all based in the gcc compiler so there must be a way to use the nice gcc compiler and an IDE, I'm not a great user of Eclipse ou CodeBlocks, but I would really love to have a nice compiler/IDE to use my two boards, I already know the CodeSourcery lite but I don't really understand how can I get it compiling some code as it is command line based.Any help will be very appreciated.Thanks in advance!

author: GeoffS
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: November 25, 2010, 03:43:58 am
content: Depends on the operating system you'll be using for this.You can run them as is under linux or under Cygwin on Windows.YAGARTOruns under the Eclipse IDE and is one I'm currently installing.

author: senso
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 25, 2010, 08:06:57 pm
content: Ups, if forgot to say that I can use both Windows Vista or Ubuntu 10.04, its straight forward to use Yagarto and Eclipse or are there obscure settings that I need to fiddle?One problem is that I dont have any Jtag programmer, only the built in programmers from the dev-boards, for now I will focus in the LPC1768 as its way more powerful that the st100xx chip in the STM discovery board, I'm what I understand using anything other than the CodeRed IDE I cant upload code to my board, right or wrong?Thanks for your help.

author: GeoffS
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: November 25, 2010, 11:46:40 pm
content: Sorry, can't answer your questions as I'm new to this myselfI've done a little PIC programming using the MPLAB free stuff but this is the first try at installing an open source IDE (Eclipse) and tool chain for a specific processor family.I run Linux (Centos 5.5) on a server which is where I want all this stuff to end up but at the moment, I'm installing to a Windows XP virtual machine via VMware as most of the IDE and toolchain stuff I've found is Windows based. As I've never been a Windows user, this is a slow process.

author: senso
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 26, 2010, 12:53:31 am
content: My only experience is AVR programming using AvrStudio and plain C and the Arduino IDE, in university I have programmed an intel 80186 processor both in C and ASM, and in computers I only have experience in programming simple things in C under linux(ubuntu) and in there its just calling the gcc in the command line to compile simples programs.I hope that everything goes in the right direction to you, as I think that without an JTag programmer I wont do anything using other IDE than the CodeRed to be able to upload the .hex to the LPC1768.

author: TheDirty
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 26, 2010, 04:16:53 am
content: The programmers on those dev boards are strictly proprietary interfaces. They may work with OpenOCD as I believe they've done some reverse engineering for some proprietary interfaces, but I don't know.From my experience with YAGARTO, yes, you will be doing a lot of "fiddling". It's not a slick and polished toolchain, and Eclipse in it's raw form was a little crazy for me.

author: tinsmith
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: November 26, 2010, 04:42:41 am
content: I'm currently using Cypress PSoC 5 for that, but mainly because it was available and it's what the majority of the people involved were comfortable with. Minimizing the collective man-hours spent learning the platform's nuances means maximizing the time spent actually developing the project.Is there anybody you know or work with who's experienced with ARMs, and preferably with the development boards you have available? Can you pester them when you get stuck? If so, use whatever they use.

author: senso
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 27, 2010, 12:44:57 am
content: Well, there is the OpenPilot project that in its wiki shows how to setup one toolchain using CodeSourcery Lite and Eclipse for the ST32M103xxx chips, and for the LPCXpresso I only know the oficial forums where almost everyone uses the CodeRed IDE.Where can I buy one Jtag/openOCD programmer?