How To Build OpenOCD With Stellaris Launchpad Support

The stable version of OpenOCD (an open source On-Chip Debugging software package) doesn’t have support for the ICDI protocol used by the Stellaris Launchpad board. But it is pretty easy to build your own OpenOCD from source after patching it to use the protocol.

We’ve already seen an open source tool used to flash binary images to the TI ARM board. But that can’t be used with GDB. With the recent inclusion of USB-based ICDI in the OpenOCD development branches we gain all the features that come with the package. We’re quite happy hear about this as we use OpenOCD for many hardware architectures and this makes development for this board feel more like normal.

Our Stellaris Launchpad hasn’t just been sitting in the closet since we got it. We’ve learned a lot by using the lm4tools to program the chip as we work our way through the online workshop. We’re really beginning to like the Stellarisware peripheral library that has been provided. For us it works in a much more intuitive way than the one that STM uses with their ARM Discovery boards. We’d recommend taking a look at the workbook PDF (which is basically a verbose listing of what’s in the video series) and the library reference (called SW-DRL-UG-9453.pdf) which is in the docs folder of the Stellarisware package.

[via Dangerous Protoypes]

11 thoughts on “How To Build OpenOCD With Stellaris Launchpad Support

  1. Hi, I have a question regarding the launchpad. I just got mine this morning and when I went to TI’s website to download the software it popped up a form for me to fill out that requested my company and companies website. I work in retail and was unsure whether or not I should put that or if they were assuming that I work for a company that would use these professionally. I just don’t want it to impact me negatively with my job :P
    Could anyone clarify this for me?

    1. When I order from or download from TI I always just put my full name in again as the company. Never had a problem buying, download, or getting samples using this method. Especially when requesting samples I try to be truthful. I’m not trying to screw them, just get free stuff.

    2. Thanks for the help! I bought the launchpad from a third party vendor, so I wasn’t required to list a company, but I did use my name for company and put ‘consumer electronics’ under what it would be used for, and it worked. Thanks again!

  2. I wonder if anyone read the errata for the included MCU on the Stellaris Launchpad. There is a extremely bug concerning unaligned accesses that renders the launchpad almost unusable if you can’t force compiler not to generate unaligned access instruction. Hopefully -mno-unaligned-access does just that.

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