Guide To Developing With The Stellaris Launchpad On A Linux Box

October 29, 2012 by Mike Szczys 42 Comments

So you picked up your very own Stellaris Launchpad, a TI ARM dev board which can be in your hands for just five bones. They do distribute several free IDEs which are not size-limited but perhaps you’re more of a text editor and command line sort of person. Well you’re in luck. There’s now a guide to show you how to code for and program the Stellaris Launchpad from a Linux box with using one of the IDEs.

There are two main things that are needed to accomplish this. The first is a cross-compiling toolchain for the ARM architecture; something that has been readily available for quite some time. The second is a way to talk to the in-built Stellaris programmer from a Linux machine. The hardware uses the ICDI protocol, and as we reported last week the lm4tools project can be used for this purpose. The guide also covers building the StellarisWare package. It’s not a requirement, but it makes using the peripherals much easier and provides names for the I/O pins, etc.

Our favorite for debugging microcontroller projects is OpenOCD. From this thread post it looks like there is now ICDI support in the development branch of the software if you don’t mind compiling from source.

Debugging The Stellaris With OpenOCD

October 21, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 19 Comments

It looks as though Texas Instruments are really reaching out to the hacker community with their new ARM-powered Stellaris dev board. On the Stellarisiti forums, a member asked about the debugging options for the Stellaris board. The Stellaris already features an In-Circuit Debug Interface (ICDI), but unfortunately it’s a little hard to get working in Linux-ey environments.

One of the devs for the Open On-Chip Debugger was already talking with TI to get the ICDI spec released for the Stellaris board. TI released the info, and after quite a bit of work, everything is open for all to see.

Right now, OpenOCD support for the Stellaris is still incomplete, but there is an project up on the Gits that allows for multi-platform development for TI’s new board.

Needless to say, getting everything up and running is still a chore. That’s not really a concern, though; the Stellaris has only been around for a few months and it takes devs time to put all the required tools into nice, neat packages. We’re just glad TI is being so forthcoming with the relevant documentation, lest development becomes a million times harder.