TKJ Electronics

So I’m quite frustrated with trying to roll my own arm-elf- toolchain. Building it was easy enough, but getting the options right is proving to be challenging. I managed to work through all the hard/soft FPU stuff with newlib, and got things to compile, but still some linker warnings/errors that result in the app crashing on the hardware. One day I’ll learn to debug and look into this more.

In the meantime, even though the download link for it is quite well hidden, I have discovered that I am quite happy with Codesourcery’s G++ Lite edition. It includes the GNU ARM buildchain, along with some of their proprietary tools (so no, I can’t mirror it 🙁 ) as an unsupported command line only free version with a license that looks very reasonable to me, so I’m pretty comfortable working with it. Thanks to those responsible for make the Lite version exist, now if only we could get an arm buildchain in the repos…

To save you the trouble of accidentally downloading their full suite trial edition like I did (feel free to purchase it if you want an IDE and other tools), here is a link to the downloads:
http://www.codesourcery.com/sgpp/lite/arm/portal/subscription?@template=lite
You will want to select the EABI (first) link (unless you need a different target OS, which for an STM you probably don’t)
The first links for the Installer are the easiest to use, everything is packaged in a Java installer to extract and setup your path, make links, etc)

I’ve been using Randomskk’s STM32 Skeleton project Randomskk’s GitHub, he has a rather nice blinking LED example in there (I had to change the LED pin for my board and fixup the Makefile to have tabs, but that was all painless).

Now to see if I can get FreeRTOS to build under arm-none-eabi – what fun, doesn’t look like it will be trivial based on the errors I’m getting so far, but I can’t imagine it should be too bad.