KINETIS development environments

[mark]

Hi All

I am wondering what development environments are being considered for future Kinetis projects?

- Freescale has CodeWarrior (the Kinetis is supported from V10.1Beta)
- Freescale promotes also IAR, Keil, CodeSourcery G++ and Greehills (which contain - or will soon contain - thread-aware debugging for the Freescale MQX RTOS)
- When MQX thread-aware debugging is not a requirement (this support is presumably an extension to the basic packages) standalone GCC (I don't know whether there is a standard Eclipse package that works with the Kinetis specifically) is available as well as Rowley Crossworks V2.1 (pending release)

The uTasker Kinetis Beta package [http://www.utasker.com/forum/index.php?topic=1252.0] presently contains the following projects:
- Stand-alone GCC
- Rowley Crossworks V2.1
- IAR6
- Keil uVision4
- Codewarrior V10.1Beta

So the questions are:
- which ones of these will most likely be used in your upcoming projects? (Or fictional project if an opinion is nevertheless available)
- should a Greenhills project be added or is this too exotic in this case?

Regards

Mark

[jezc]

Hi Mark,

My main push will be with IAR v6 (because I already have it & am getting used to it) but I might also continue the struggle with CodeWarrior in the future (there are a few possible projects where the free MQX support in both of these will help me where I can't currently use uTasker).

The CodeWarrior route will probably be useful for people migrating from the other Freescale products (e.g. ColdFire) - I'd use IAR for the ColdFire as well if uTasker supported it!

HTH

Cheers,
    Jez

[mark]

Hi Jez

I know of a couple of uTasker Coldfire projects being performed with IAR for Freescale Coldfire. I also have installed the Kick Start version so will take a look at getting an IAR Coldfire configuration into the project too.

Regards

Mark

[jezc]

Hi Mark,

Great - no huge rush for this but it'd be nice (for me at least) to stay with the more familiar IDE etc (and another excuse to avoid Eclipse for a while longer... )

If you want any sanity-checks running on the IAR side, just drop me an e-mail.

I'm still struggling to get the older CW versions running on Win7 Pro x64 (or at least the debugger connection) so the IAR route might be another way to move development onto the newer PC. I'd love to move the newer projects to Kinetis, just need some non-BGA device packages for k60 etc

Cheers,
    Jez

[neil]

Hi Mark,
 We are looking closely at the Kinetis for a future project, it has some good features and looks the best route as we already using the 52259 chip.
 For me, I would like to stick with Codewarrior if possible

Regards
Neil

[mark]

Hi All

The CodeWarrior V10.1 version has now been released and is available as 30 day evaluation or special edition on the Freescale web site: http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=CW-MCU10 [676MBytes in size!]

The special edition allows code size up to 128k to be generated for Coldfire and Kinetis, which is adequate for the largest uTasker project to date.

Regards

Mark

[jezc]

Hi Mark,

I've been notified that IAR have issued a warning that it's possible to permanently lock up the Kinetis k60!

Basically if the default linker file from IAR is used & the code reaches adress 0x40C, the NVFSEC register, it's possible to set the mass erase & flash security bits & permanently & irreversably lock the device.

There's a full description of the possible issue & how to avoid it on the IAR support pages (note 77989).

Hope no-one falls foul of this one!

Cheers,
   Jez

[mark]

Hi Jez

Yes, one does have to be a bit careful about this.

I modified the linker scripts so that the the FLASH security configuration is in the code and the main code starts after it (no risk of random code values causing a lock up).

I like the Crossworks programmer since it actively skips programming these security bytes (it leaves them at 0xff) and so avoids the problem even if data were to be there. Not sure whether this is an intentional "feature" but it is nice and safe....;-)

Regards

Mark

[Michael Johnson]

Hi,

Not allowing writes to the security area (without recompiling the loader) is an intentional feature in the CrossWorks Kinetis CPU support package. I managed to lock a TMS470B1M board which had a similar feature - once bitten.

Regards
Michael