PlatformIO And Visual Studio Take Over The World

April 7, 2017 by Al Williams 40 Comments

In a recent post, I talked about using the “Blue Pill” STM32 module with the Arduino IDE. I’m not a big fan of the Arduino IDE, but I will admit it is simple to use which makes it good for simple things.

I’m not a big fan of integrated development environments (IDE), in general. I’ve used plenty of them, especially when they are tightly tied to the tool I’m trying to use at the time. But when I’m not doing anything special, I tend to just write my code in emacs. Thinking about it, I suppose I really don’t mind an IDE if it has tools that actually help me. But if it is just a text editor and launches a few commands, I can do that from emacs or another editor of my choice. The chances that your favorite IDE is going to have as much editing capability and customization as emacs are close to zero. Even if you don’t like emacs, why learn another editor if there isn’t a clear benefit in doing so?

There are ways, of course, to use other tools with the Arduino and other frameworks and I decided to start looking at them. After all, how hard can it be to build Arduino code? If you want to jump straight to the punch line, you can check out the video, below.

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Explaining The Low Level Stuff You Don’t Know About ARM Programming

September 17, 2013 by Mathieu Stephan 8 Comments

Most of us don’t realize how spoiled we are with the different development environments available on the internet. If someone wants to start a blank project on a new [ARM/DSP/…] platform, he usually fires up the dedicated Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and starts coding a C/C++ program. However, there are many initialization routines and scripts required with your program before it can run correctly. In his great article, [Andrew] explains to us what these are by starting a blank project without using any IDE.

As you can see in the above picture, [Andrew]’s project is made around an Atmel SAM4E microcontroller. The chosen toolchain is the arm-none-eabi-gcc from GNU Tools for ARM Embedded Processors. The first part of the article starts with a simplified explanation on how/why your code and variables are split into different memory sections (.bss, .data, .rodata, .text), then [Andrew] details how the linker script will put these sections at different physical addresses depending on your microcontroller’s memory layout. He also shows us how to take care of the stack placement, vector table, variable (non)initialization, and C Runtime. For information, the latter is executed when your processor starts, it is in charge of setting up the stack pointer, initializing the RAM, setting up the standard library and calling the main().

A very nice introduction on the very low level routines running on most processors out there.