Daily Archives: May 8, 2009

As a bit of a backup to the whole bootloader thing, I bought an Olimex ARM-USB-OCD JTAG adaptor. This is a multi purpose device that provides you with a USB JTAG interface to the ARM, a USB serial port and a power supply for your target board. It looks pretty useful and is supported by the openOCD project as well as Rowley Crossworks. JTAG is fast for flash programming and pretty well a one-touch solution in Crossworks. I was quite excited when it arrived and hurried to get it set up. By now, I should know better…

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One of the more attractive features or the STM32 processors, at least in their more recent revisions, is the presence of a built-in serial bootloader. JTAG is all very well but you need extra hardware and then software to drive it. If you want to do in-circuit debugging, it is ideal. However, for my use, I don’t much want a 20 pin header and I find the debugging feature for a micromouse to be a little redundant. Debugging can be done on a static test rig. But then, if I want to update the mouse software, a serial bootloader is perfect and I can use the same serial connection to communicate with my code when it is running

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CodeSourcery are the maintainers of the GNU Toolchain for ARM processors. They have a range of commercial offerings but, if you are prepared to use command-line tools, they also provide just those as Sourcery G++ Lite. The Lite edition includes the GNU C and C++ compilers, GNU Assembler and Linker, GNU debugger and Instruction Set Simulator. For Windows and Linux hosts, these are available as binary distributions that simply install and are ready to use. For the Mac, you need to build them from sources available on the CodeSourcery site.

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