Welcome to the Introduction to Embedded Systems Software and Development Environments. This course is focused on giving you real world coding experience and hands on project work with ARM based Microcontrollers. You will learn how to implement software configuration management and develop embedded software applications. Course assignments include creating a build system using the GNU Toolchain GCC, using Git version control, and developing software in Linux on a Virtual Machine. The course concludes with a project where you will create your own build system and firmware that can manipulate memory. The second course in this 2 course series , Embedded Software and Hardware Architecture, will use hardware tools to program and debug microcontrollers with bare-metal firmware. Using a Texas Instruments MSP432 Development Kit, you will configure a variety of peripherals, write numerous programs, and see your work execute on your own embedded platform!
8. Development Kits and Documentation
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來自 University of Colorado Boulder 的課程
Introduction to Embedded Systems Software and Development Environments
148 個評分
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University of Colorado Boulder
148 個評分
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Embedded System Development Components
Module 1 will introduce the learner to the components of your embedded system software development process. This module will be a quick overview for many topics with detailed analysis to follow in later modules and courses. We start with defining the hardware and software building blocks of Embedded Systems which will include a C-programming refresher. Next you will learn about the important tools a developer will need to use to help design, build and manage their designs. This includes development environments, version control and the hardware kits to install on. Learners will install and use a Virtual machine to complete Week 1 Application Assignment.
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Alex FosdickInstructor
Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering
In this video,
we'll look at the manufacturer and third party hardware development kits and
the important documentation that is needed to configure your microcontroller.
Development kits are an important tool for
software engineers to start becoming familiar with an architecture.
Designing hardware takes a lot of experience and
you hope your platform has no hardware bugs that stall your software progress.
By using evaluation kits, you have a pretty generic hardware platform
with lots of vendor support for you to get your software design started.
Most projects begin by using developers kit to evaluate platform options.
There are many manufacturers of microcontroller integrated circuits, ICs,
or application-specific integrated circuits, ASICs, in the industry.
Some examples include Texas Instruments, Silicon Labs,
Atmel, or NXP Semi-conductors.
The silicon manufacturers often make many different type of chips
with an assortment of features, and they sell their chips for a variety of vendors.
Knowing how to pick a particular chip is difficult because there
are particular factors you need to investigate before
committing a product to a particular chip choice.
Inside the IC,
there's also a chance that different parts of silicon were built by different people.
ARM is a good example, as they build CPU cores and other technology for
silicon manufacturers.
Microcontrollers have many features that you need to know about before making
a selection, especially because there will be software implications.
Some important features include the word size, the number of registers,
flash and RAM sizes, branch prediction support, instruction and
data cache support, floating point arithmetic support, or DMA support.
These features affect the operation and performance on embedded platform.
For instance, as you design your project, you will have to answer questions such as,
how much memory will I need for my application?
How fast does my application need to run?
And what kind of mathematical support do I need?
You likely need to have some of these answers before you commit to a particular
microcontroller.
The process of creating this feature and
operation requirements checklist is called a specification, or a features spec.
It's possible that you need to make significant software changes, or
even a hardware change, in the middle of a design process
if you did not evaluate your initial designs correctly.
In general, you do not select a chip or a part at random.
There is some investigation of features and specs needed at the beginning of
a project, which includes some prototyping and proof of concept.
Fortunately, manufacturers help with this process by providing resources to analyze
their products.
There are many documents that describe how to pick out a platform or
evaluate a particular chip.
We start with discussing the Selector Guide.
This helps a user slip down choices by interactively selecting feature sets
for our design.
It shows a full processor family.
A chip family will share the same chip architecture.
Each sub-family typically has more differences in supported hardware.
And each device in a sub-family only has a slightly variances from
one sub-family part to another.
This guide example is somewhat of a painful chart to look at
to select the part.
However, this guide usually has a web-based
interface which makes it much easier to search through.
If you find some interesting parts from the selector guide,
you can obtain some more information using the product brief.
This gives a concise overview for quick evaluation of a platform for
design, but more details than what you will see in the selector guide.
This is much more marketed, and
is far less dense than strict product specifications.
Once you have slimmed down your selections to a subset of models, you can start
getting into much more detailed documentation sources like the datasheet.
This document gives technical specifications on a chip or
a family of chips with a breakdown of all the differences between each version or
part number within the family.
Pin counts as well as operation specifications are provided with diagrams,
tables and plots.
These operation specifications can include many things.
Electrical characteristics such as voltage and current operating ratings,
where we get information on power specs of various conditions and operating modes.
Timing characteristics are provided for our operation of the microcontroller.
You will find info on the limit of the processor's clock frequencies.
There are timing diagrams that show expected time delays
before certain digital signals are asserted.
These quantities are usually measured in micro or nano seconds.
The datasheet even includes some extra data on how environmental effects,
such as temperature, can affect the device or the operation characteristics.
Lastly, you will also find physical design constraints, such as a CAD drawing
with dimensions for the physical package and footprints of the chip.
The materials in the datasheet is not just for a hardware engineer to use.
Timing characteristics are very important for a software engineer to know about so
they may predict or calculate runtime requirements and performance.
In addition, the datasheet is going to detail the pinpoint mappings for
a peripheral device you might use.
This is a table that describes which pins match up to the general IO ports
of the microcontroller, and
subsequently, which pins can connect to certain peripheral devices.
The datasheet does not typically provide information on configuration.
For that, we need to look at the Family Technical Reference Manual.
This manual describes information on general platform components and
configuration.
You may then have a sub-family reference manual which covers particular settings of
a specific device.
These are manuals that you need to look up to know how you go about
configuring a chip using Bare-Metal Firmware.
Sometimes the Family Technical Manuals are missing information or
issues are found with the chip after the release of the product.
This is called the Chip Errata.
This is a document that contains additional and corrective information for
our particular device set.
It will list problems with the description of the configuration or
the hardware's operation.
They usually provide a workaround in the errata sheet.
It is important that if something is operating unexpectedly with your chips
that you consult the errata.
Now that a chip has been chosen, we need to start on a proof of concept and
software prototyping.
Not all customers have the time or ability to design a printed circuit board or
a evaluate their chosen chips and design.
Many businesses just create development kits and
module boards so that prototyping can be be done easily, speeding up the time it
takes chip manufacturers to get their products in customer hands for evaluation.
Here we have two example development kits.
The first is a microcontroller development kit called the Freedom FRDM-KL25Z.
This board is a product of NXP and
has many impressive features including some supplemental external hardware,
a capacitive touch slide, an RGB LED, and an accelerometer.
These are purposely added so
that some simple applications can be developed with external hardware
as part of the evaluation process for the microcontroller.
A second example is the wireless module featuring the Nordic nRF24L01 chip.
This is not a microcontroller development kit.
Development kits are not limited to microcontroller silicon manufacturers
since any type of sensor, external memory, driver or
communication device would want to be evaluated.
The part is a difficult package to solder called a QFN package.
And that may have specific requirements for its antenna.
However, the board is built in a way that it can
easily connect through microcontroller boards using a few extra wires.
As an embedded software engineer, you can easily acquire many of these module boards
or microcontroller development kits without deep hardware knowledge.
Although you will need to figure out the connection and
interface requirements between your boards.
Now having access to a platform, you can start developing
a software proof of concept without any hardware design overhead.
Once a chip and development kit has been acquired,
you need to get access to a compiler, some programmer debugger hardware and
the executable installer software.
The design of these support systems, dev kits, debuggers, programmers and
software, are often done by applications and
tool engineers from the chip manufacturer companies or third party vendors.
But these kits, extra hardware and
software tools often come at an expensive price from the manufacturer.
Competition in this market of dev kits has grown significantly with the need for
even faster prototyping.
As a result, four dev kits have become even more widely available
at a cheap price with free software tools and
integrated programmer debugger hardware on the kit itself.
Take, for example, the Freedom Board.
This board has a secondary processor which is used to run as an onboard program
debugger adaptor that can flash our target processor, the KL25Z.
This adaptor is called OpenSDA.
The OpenSDA has a specialized, dedicated connection to the processor target for
debug support and for the programmer interface.
The user will connect to this open SDA platform
by connecting a USB cable to the host machine and
running a special integrated development environment for this processor.
Other manufactures have done similar things.
That could be an example of Texas Instruments.
Here is an MSP432 launch pad that houses the MSP432 Core text in.
It comes with a dedicated onboard emulator for programming,
debugging, and energy measurements.
Texas Instruments calls their technology the XDS110 EnergyTrace on-board emulator.
This EnergyTrace technology is an added system
to evaluate energy uses of the target processor during application.
This is in addition to debugging and installing.
These onboard programmer debuggers provide much cheaper options for
the software development tool sets you can use to interact with the desired
embedded platform.
In this video we learned about the importance of development kits and
the documentation for designing an embedded system.
Documentation will provide you architecture-specific information
to configure your platform.
And the kit will provide you early software prototyping and
build your confidence in working with the hardware.
With access to these items,
you can evaluate many different processors to see if they meet your project's needs.
