Last week I got my LPC-P2148 ARM7 micro-controller. It’s a pretty nice development board with two serial ports, usb device controller, sd/mmc card slot, AD and DA converters and some other useful stuff. At the start it was very hard to get it work for me. I’m a total newbie on arm controllers. In school we always had intel processors and programmed them with windows. But now I wanted to program it with Mac OS X so I needed an extra USB/Serial/JTAG adapter. In the starer kit I got an OpenOCD-USB adapter which is totally free under the GPL terms and works perfectly with Mac OS X.

To get that setup to work under Mac OS X (10.5.6) you need the following software parts:

OpenOCD

libusb-1.0.0 libftdi-0.15 openocd-0.1.0

ARM-ELF-GCC (Download the compiler and follow the instructions under “Installation”) Of corse you need the apple developer tools installed for make and some other useful tools

Now how to get these things set up:

libusb and libftdi can you easy install with the following commands (execute them inside the corresponding directory): ./configure make sudo make install

For openocd you need to add some parameters for configure: ./configure --enable-ft2232_libftdi --enable-usbprog make sudo make install

Now we should be able to start openocd from the command with the following output: oPostBookPro:~ tpost$ openocd Open On-Chip Debugger 0.1.0 (2009-03-25-18:33) Release BUGS? Read http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/openocd/trunk/BUGS $URL: https://kc8apf@svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/openocd/tags/openocd-0.1.0/src/openocd.c $ Can't find openocd.cfg

So we need to configure openocd to work with the lpc-p2148 board. I use these two configs (openocd-usb.cfg and lpc2148.cfg) for the following openocd.cfg source [find cfg/openocd-usb.cfg] source [find cfg/lpc2148.cfg]

These two cfg’s are mostly copied from the configurations shipped with the oepnocd source. I only added a few lines.

making gdb debugging work

gdb_breakpoint_override hard gdb_memory_map enable Now we are able to connect to the controller: PostBookPro:openocd tpost$ openocd -f openocd.cfg Open On-Chip Debugger 0.1.0 (2009-03-25-18:33) Release BUGS? Read http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/openocd/trunk/BUGS $URL: https://kc8apf@svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/openocd/tags/openocd-0.1.0/src/openocd.c $ jtag_speed: 5 force hard breakpoints Info : JTAG tap: lpc2148.cpu tap/device found: 0x4f1f0f0f (Manufacturer: 0x787, Part: 0xf1f0, Version: 0x4) Error: JTAG tap: lpc2148.cpu got: 0x4f1f0f0f (mfg: 0x787, part: 0xf1f0, ver: 0x4) Error: JTAG tap: lpc2148.cpu expected 1 of 1: 0xffffffff (mfg: 0x7ff, part: 0xffff, ver: 0xf) Error: trying to validate configured JTAG chain anyway... Warn : no telnet port specified, using default port 4444 Warn : no gdb port specified, using default port 3333 Warn : no tcl port specified, using default port 6666

(Maybe someone can tell my why I get this error? I ignored it by now and I haven’t had any problems)

How we can see there is now running a telnet server on port 4444 (you can connect to it and take a look at the controller) and a gdb remote debugging daemon on 3333. I use the gdb with an init script. Which was very hard to make. The gdb init script:

load the main.out for debugging symbols

file main.out

connect to the remote debugging daemon

target remote localhost:3333

reset and halt the controller

monitor reset monitor halt

set MEMMAP to User Flash Mode

monitor mww 0xE01FC040 0x0001

finally upload your program image (.bin or .hex) and restart

monitor flash write_image erase /Path/To/Your/Compiled/Program/main.hex ihex monitor soft_reset_halt

break main

continue

Finally we can start the gdb and play around with a program. Be aware that openocd must be started to connect gdb to your controller! PostBookPro:BlinkAndBeep tpost$ arm-elf-gdb -command=arm-elf-gdb-init.sh GNU gdb 6.4 Copyright 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc. ... You can get my first try out project here. Press on B1 and you can see the LED1 and hear a beep on the BUZZER. By pressing B2 the LED2 flashes. More resources:

Schema Controller Manual

I’m very glad that I got through all and my controller is now working perfectly fine under Mac OS X. Once again no Windows needed! I hope I find the time to play a bit around with the controller and post some stuff here soon.