Author name: Richard Man

In the first decade after C++ was released, there were two frequent statements made about the new programming language, especially in the C community: C allows you to shoot your foot off, but C++ allows you to shoot the whole leg off. C++ is “just an object-oriented language”. If you have heard of either of these, it’s time to put those ideas away. Looking at C++ in 2019, it’s clearly a rich language that provides many features for writing safe, efficient code, using concepts such as generic programming. The expressive power of modern C++ comes mainly from the use of […]

One of the most difficult issues in moving to Cortex-M MCU development from an 8-bit ecosystem is the complexity of the I/O peripherals. The Cortex-M peripherals are more capable and more flexible, but are also more difficult to use and write programs for. To help users gain proficiency as quickly as possible, we created the JumpStart API. You can see on the linked page how it clearly beats the competition such as mBed and ST’s libraries. In this post, we will look at some practical examples. Challenge 1: Write a program that toggles an LED using a timer interrupt –

Are you interested in upgrading your ease-and-speed-of-programming options? Are you still working with 8-bit MCUs and wish to take advantage of the more powerful and even lower cost Cortex-M MCU, but are worried about making the jump? Are you working with slow Eclipse-based IDE or ST CubeMX and wish that just loading the tools won’t require taking a long coffee break? Are you daunted by how difficult it can be to just get an LED blinking and wish for an easier way to do it? Are you frustrated with unsupported free tools that cost you time and money to get

Cortex-M0 based MCUs are notable for their low cost and relatively smaller amount of available flash memory. If you wish to use floating point operations but are running tight on space, QFPlib is a great alternative. The core single-precision floating-point add/sub/mul/div/cmp operations take less than 400 bytes. According to QFPlib’s author, the corresponding routines in the GCC native library, by contrast, are over 2700 bytes in size, and the whole M0 library, including some trigonometric routines, comes in just slightly over 1K bytes. QFPlib is even smaller than floating-point routines for other micros, including some such as the one for

When developing firmware for an embedded project, it is important to know how much flash and SRAM the program is using. This allows you to make the best decision on whether the chosen MCU has sufficient resources for your needs. By default, GCC does not give any information regarding program size. However, GCC does include a utility that can help, sensibly it is called “size.exe” (or “arm-none-eabi-size.exe” for the embedded GCC version). If you run the program as follows: c:\iccv9cortex\gnuarm\bin\arm-none-eabi-size -A -x bin\Debug\Test.elf The /path/to/ is as installed by ImageCraft’s JumpStart C++ program, but any embedded GCC installation will have