8/28/2010

LEDs are blinking!



Today I have been successful in getting the two LEDs blinking on the board, as the video will show.

A recap of what I did:


  • Install arm-elf-gcc toolchain, roughly using instructions from Madox.net. I used GCC-4.3.3 instead of 4.3.2. And, instead of using "/usr/local" as the prefix, I chose to use "/usr/local/arm" so that the executables don't get mixed in with other things in my OS. This caused a problem when building newlib because it depends on the gcc executable that should be in the path. Basically, "sudo" commands don't take on the path set in ~/.bashrc so when using "sudo make all install" to install newlib, the arm-elf-gcc is not found. This is solved by changing to root using "su" and manually adding /usr/local/arm/bin to the path. Not the best way to do it, but it works.
  • Install Flash Magic in WINE. This is easy. Download the installer EXE from flashmagictool.com and then run it in Wine and let it install wherever it wants.
  • Add a symbolic link in ~/.wine/dosdevices/ as follows: link com1 to /dev/ttyUSB0 to use USB serial port. With this, Flash Magic successfully uses the serial port to communicate with the LPC's bootloader.
  • Download sample code (by Martin Thomas) for similar processor, available here. This is for LPC23XX but it's very similar to LPC24XX. To be safe, I found the LPC24xx.h header file in a sample application zip folder provided by NXP, and used that instead of the 23xx.h included in the project. I used this sample code to create a template for HAC-1. Martin's webpage says this is set up for WinARM, but the makefile works just fine as-is on a Linux command line as well.
  • For now, I have removed much of what was in Martin's main.c file, such as the timer and UART functions. Martin had some LED blink code in there, but it was set for a particular commercial board where the LED is on a different pin, so I moved it to the pin that one of our LEDs is on and duplicated it for the second LED.
  • In the Common/src folder of the template, the setup routine in target.c is supposed to enable the PLL and start up the external 12MHz oscillator. For some reason the program doesn't seem to work in this case, so for now I have commented out the call to the function ConfigurePLL() and left the CPU running on the internal oscillator. Hopefully we can get this kink ironed out before moving on to the display controller; The 4MHz internal RC oscillator will not be sufficient for that.

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