M4 coprocessor on iMX8

[davidvescovi]

My IDE microcontroller development system does not specifically support the M4 coprocessor on the iMX8 by name.

But it does support many of the standalone NXP M4 processors.

My question is which (standalone) NXP M4 processor or family is "closest" to the core used on the i.MX8?

Would it make sense to use one of these for development? Is this possible?

[davidvescovi]

Victor suggested using MCUXpress but as far as I can tell there are no examples. Nor is the generated SDK even compatible with the IDE!

None of the iMX8's or the iMX7's generated SDK's even though generated to support the GCC toolchain remotely compile. 

[bernhardfink]

Just to finish this thread:

The MCUXpresso IDE only covers microcontroller platforms. This means, that the i.MX devices with Cortex-A + Cortex-M are not supported at all.

There are devices called i.MX RT, these are derivatives from the standard i.MX6ULL devices, where the Cortex-A7 has been replaced by a Cortex-M7. This makes it a microcontroller and this is supported by the MCUXpresso IDE.

For the other i.MX devices with an integrated Cortex-M4 we have a so called MCUXpresso SDK (= Software Driver Kit or if you like also Software Development Kit), this is a code package which has the name "MCUXpresso" in it, but is not intended for usage with the IDE. In this package you find make files and you can compile the examples using GCC. There are also project files for IAR EWARM if you have a license for this tool. Anyway, you can't load/import anything from this package into the MCUXpresso IDE.

Regards,

Bernhard.

[b36401]

We can suggest to use MCUXpresso SDK:
https://www.nxp.com/support/developer-resources/software-development-tools/i.mx-developer-resources/...
It can build code for M4 core of i.MX8.

[davidvescovi]

I downloaded and installed xpresso IDE (Windows) and generated a IMX8MQ SDK.

I selected the gcc tool chain option (not using IAR).

I dragged and dropped the SDK into the IDE but as far as I can tell there are no examples included with the SDK.

I tried to manually download some examples … like hello_world and freertos_i2c (the one I am really interested in) but they do not seem to import correctly.  What am I missing?

[davidvescovi]

so then I tried to just do a "New Project" selected the MIMX8MQ6xxxJZ board and the rest defaults and it looks like it generated a project ok but it does not build... it errors on #include  "MIMX8MQ6.h"    No such file or directory!

[davidvescovi]

I tried to unzip the hello_world project and then "import project from file system", selected the unzipped root directory hit next then I get "No projects are found to import"