Re:Assistance

[satyajit_83]

Hello Everyone,
          I am a student from India and I am a robotic enthusiast until now I have been working with AVR controllers but I am looking forward for using the new coldfire(MCF5213) microcontroller for my upcoming project. Can anyone tell me are there any free development tools for coldfire.also can anyone tell me is it possible or rather are there any programmer schematics available for coldfire.I am asking this because buying a devlopment board is not possible for me at this time due to budget and time constraints. Please help me with this issue. I will be greatful to you for the same.
Thanking you
Satyajit

[SimonMarsden_de]

Hi Satyajit

Another tool that might be useful to you is "ColdFire Init (CFInit)". This is a free tool which helps you to write initialisation code for ColdFire processors.

CFInit lets you specify how to configure the ColdFire chip through a graphical interface - for example, how to configure the memory, Flash, chip selects, etc. When you're ready, it generates C or assembler code to do the configuration.

The URL is:

http://www.microapl.co.uk/CFInit/cfinit_main.html


Good luck with your new project.


Simon

[w_wegner]

Hi,

of course, there are free development tools! On the one hand, you can get a somewhat limited version of the CodeWarrior Studio from Freescale that is an all-in-one solution. I have no experience with that, though. On the other hand, you can use the gcc toolchain under both unix and windows with all the tools known from regular gcc development.

For debugging, in case you use gcc, the best choice might be to use a "BDM wiggler", for which several clones can be found as schematic on the web. Then you have full gdb support and do not have to worry much, although it is quite slow concerning transfer speed.

For Codewarrior, you can use Daniel´s TBLCF USB tool, which is quite convenient and a bit faster, but there is currently no gdb support.

HTH,
Wolfgang

(I started with TBLCF, but because of the gdb problems I was not able to solve completely, I switched to PEEDI now and am very confident with this solution, however it is rather costly. There are some other people working on gdb support for TBLCF, too, but I am not up to date about what state it is in right now.)