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In our shop, we use IAR and EMBOS - it gets expensive in a hurry.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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Keil seems relatively affordable, if relatively affordable is about $2k a year
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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That's not affordable.
Anyway, why Keil when possibly GCC could do it?
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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It depends on what you're doing. If it was just a development subscription I'd consider it. I'd just pad my bids to cover the cost. It's really not that much money per month.
That being said, after further correspondence with them it seems they want to charge me ongoing fees on a per project basis.
That's not acceptable. I am unwilling to saddle my clients with ongoing royalties. They pay me for deliverables.
As far as GCC, GCC is a compiler, and if you're being generous, the C standard libraries
That's not enough to realistically develop on an ARM Chip. If you want to use the HDMI capabilities, USB 2.0 hosting, I2C, or really any of the peripherals on that chip you will be going straight to the registers.
A hardware abstraction layer for a complicated ARM could take as much as 10 man years or more to implement.
It's not cost effective to develop it myself. Keil provides packages for all of this.
However, it looks like Armbian – Linux for ARM development boards[^] may be a better option.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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Many MCU (e.g. Cypress, Microchip,...) vendors base their IDEs on GCC. Some of them provides them for free.
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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Right, but again GCC doesn't include everything that I need. I need the bootloader and the HAL, and all that happy business.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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Quote: I need the bootloader and the HAL, and all that happy business
I hardly believe all such stuff is provided by Keil. ARM licenses the core, the peripherals are manufacturer specific.
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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I may be misunderstanding something significant. The peripherals I'm referring to are part of the SoC. You're saying those are manufacturer specific? I guess that would make sense.
Hmmmm.
Let me ask a stupid question since you clearly have forgotten more about this than I've hope to learn in the time I have to learn it: (By which I mean relative to you I am an utter idiot about all this. I never went to school for it or anything)
If I order this.
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/nxp-usa-inc/MIMXRT1062DVJ6B/13574426[^]
(- In theory anyway. It isn't in stock, which is actually part of my problem - I'll explain)
Where do I go to get anything beyond a datasheet and maybe a hardware manual to tell me what registers to use?
I find it hard to believe that there aren't HAL packages and such available for an SOC like this.
Are you saying I'd get it (in this case, from NXP?)
I haven't seen much from NXP for this at their site, but I didn't think to look that hard either.
As far as my problem: I want to use these ARMs primarily to expand my display options, but also to take advantage some more modern features than I can get on say, ESP32 nonsense.
I actually have a bootloader and a HAL for the chip I linked to (assuming I bookmarked the right one, I'd have to look to be 100% sure) but it's provided by PJRC via their Teensy 4.1 kit, and it's specific to that chip.
Here's what I want to be able to do. When I'm approached with a project, I want to match requirements with an ARM chip, and then find one I can integrate, with a HAL layer and bootloader I don't have to write. Or at least the HAL, as that would make it not economical to develop against.
And by peripherals, I mean the peripherals built in to this SoC, not on an external board, to be clear - like its USB 2.0 Host/Device capabilities, it's I2S, SPI, and I2C capabilities etc.
Is this even realistic?
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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I am not that expert. My targets are much simpler (M0 and M3).
Anyway, I think having the Teensy is a big starting point: you have a hardware reference design as well the libraries (I believe the chip on the their board is NXP, not theirs, so the software should work on your hardware).
I see NXP provides its MCUXpresso SDK (which, strangley enough, relies on 'Arm GCC') you may have a look at it.
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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Thanks. Yeah, I contacted PJRC who makes teensy, about subbing a different NXP chip with their bootloader and HAL.
I asked if it would work. They were like "will it? You tell us!"
And when I looked at the specs I realized there's no way some of the registers aren't different.
So no I don't think PJRC's offerings will work with arbitrary NXPs, and unfortunately it's quite a bit of time and money just to check.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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Time to buy a NXP (or whatever manufacturer you choose) develompment board.
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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This:
"That being said, after further correspondence with them it seems they want to charge me ongoing fees on a per project basis.
That's not acceptable. I am unwilling to saddle my clients with ongoing royalties. They pay me for deliverables."
Same issue for us. The company I contract with would rather pay upfront, since they'll be selling this system for 20+ years. Plus, keeping track of everything sold and the accounting is a real PITA. They think in terms of product not software.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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Quote: That's not affordable.
How long such a stack will survive/be up to date? Let's be optimistic and say 5 Years. Makes at the end 10K$. How many hours these 10K $ allows you to do the whole thing from scratch?
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You don't necessarily have to do it from scratch. For instance, my everyday work with M0 and M3 MCUs is strongly supported by their productor, via a very effective code generator (and the worst code editor I've ever used) and the GCC toolchain.
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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I don't see anyone mentioning Zephyr yet (Zephyr Project[^]).
As as development environment it certainly is far less complete than Visual Studio, but reasonably well adapted to standard Linux element from which you can compose your setup. (As always under Linux  )
Zephyr is most certainly an IoT- and SoC-oriented OS, not requiring you to carry a ton of general-purpose Linux stuff that you don't need, yet providing a very Linux-like interface for the stuff you really make use of.
And it is free and open-source.
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Absolutely I'd expect Zephyr, FreeRTOS, or some other realtime OS to be present if the thing has multiple cores, or potentially multiple filesystem mount points (SDMMC/Flash/etc), and is commonly present on gadgets like this.
Unfortunately it's not the last mile I'd need.
For Zephyr to work for a particular chip it needs to be ported to it. For example, there is a Zephyr port to the ESP32 SoC/MCU: Zephyr RTOS on ESP32 - Zephyr Project[^]
I'd need one for any particular ARM chip I was using.
Zephyr would save me time vs going from scratch, but I don't want to be in the market of making HAL layers for devices so an RTOS can run on them. I'm hoping I can find that effort already made.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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If you’re more specific what actually you need from Cortex M for your project could try to help for the whole product r&d life cycle. The most important is which constraints you have and how you prioritize them - time? r&d costs? lower BoM costs? maintenance costs? long term components availability? etc … You can get one max two of these, the rest will be compromised. Choosing toolchain is just a small implementation detail that comes easily once you clear your requirements, constraints and priorities. Not vice verse.
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No no no no no.
This isn't about a project.
This is about moving all of my projects.
Requirements vary based on project. That's why there are eleventy gazillion chips ARM based chips out there.
I want to gather my requirements from a client, go to digikey, place an order for a chip that meets those requirements.
And once I'm there, I want to be able actually *use* the damned chip, which isn't about requirements gathering or figuring scope or any of that.
It's about getting a HAL and a bootloader for said chip.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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In that case I'm afraid that you will need to decide project by project. There is no universal HAL & bootloader who cover gazillions of custom ARM SoC in the wild. Once you got experienced (i.e. work on 5-10 projects) it will be obvious which SoC to use once you know the requirements. GCC and any open source RTOS should be fine for most cases. Some SoC (even big ones) provide SDK that's based on open source RTOS with support and examples of their custom hardware. Some closed source RTOS vendors support wide range of platforms but as you know - royalties need to be covered.
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I'm not looking at choosing one chip that works universally for every project.
I'm looking at matching the appropriate ARM chip with the appropriate project, and then finding the packages I need to make that chip work. Every time. Every chip. Every project.
When I say I'm moving all projects, I don't mean anything I'm currently working on or have finished. I just mean moving forward with future developments. ARM has enough varieties, and SoC manufacturers build enough different systems that I can pretty much stick to the ARM ecosystem for everything.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
modified 19-Apr-23 10:58am.
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A major reason why I brought up Zephyr is your mentioning of ARM, which is the basis for the NRF IoT/SoC chips marketed by Nordic Semiconductor (Nordic Semiconductor[^]). Their primary architecture is ARM, and their primary OS is Zephyr.
When you start with Zephyr on ARM - whether on Nordic's NRF chips or some other ARM chip - it is definitely not 'making HAL layers for devices so an RTOS can run on them'. That is exactly what Zephyr has done, long ago. There is no need to spend resources on porting Zephyr to ARM. That was done years ago (I suspect that ARM was one of the targets when Zephyr was initially designed!).
But of course: If you do not want to consider Zephyr, please feel free not to!
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So they build and maintain Zephyr OS versions for arbitrary chips I can buy off digikey?
And then if I want to use the HDMI facilities of that same chip? Then what?
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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HDMI is not so common on the Cortex-M range. If you need rich GUI or hardware media decoding/encoding probably cheap Cortex-A will be a better choice where you can run embedded linux with all whistles and bells. Well, it's not so real-time but so far in my experience there was almost no project where it was really necessary. Another approach is to use Cortex-M core for the real-time tasks and Cortex-A for the GUI - there are lot of offers where these cores are bundled on the same SoC. And it will not add costs - few days ago there was GUI capable board $7 DongshanPI-PicoW is a small Arm Linux board with SSW101B USB WiFi chip, four 12-pin headers - CNX Software[^]. Of course you need to keep in mind that such suppliers could disappear in a year. Similar TI or ST SoC that will be in production for 10 years costs x5 or x10, then you need to put it on board with all the necessary components, etc ... as you can see everything matters. Hardware is hard business.
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I'm not limiting us to the M line. I found at least one A7 that will do HDMI, and is very affordable, plus more than we need for most UI/UX needs. I don't necessarily need HDMI, as I could potentially use RGB 24-bit LCD interfaces given enough pins. I'm assuming the Cortex series can drive a series of digital pins via DMA (the ESP32 can and uses it for RGB but only supports 16-bit - most screens are 24)
Adding, I'm not the hardware person here. I have a couple of engineers I work with. I am the adventurous one willing to branch out and expand our hardware options. Part of this is for me, and part of it is to have something to bring to my engineers.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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