[TriEmbed] Anybody doing offline builds of mbed?

[Jon Wolfe]

If you're already playing with the Nucleo boards, I'd suggest taking a
look at ChibiOS. As far as open-source embedded platforms go, it's one
of the most polished and well documented I've seen. They also make
"ChibiStudio" which is a customized eclipse build that has JTAG/debug
support and a debugging plugin that lets you look at OS specific
structures such as threads and stack. There are tons of add-on and
community made extensions to support sd cards, sensors, displays, etc. 

I've used it with the ST Discovery boards, but it also reported has
built in support for the Nucleos, which have a lot in common with the
Discovery boards. Being able to put in break points and inspect
variables is orders of magnitude faster for finding bugs that the serial
print/rebuild/re-run cycle.

Speaking of discovery boards, the latest ST Discovery looks pretty
sweet, 

http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/PF259090 [1]

More than twice the price of the Nucleo, but you get:

Arm Cortex-MF4 with *hardware floating point*, and DSP
2mb flash
256kb ram
180 Mhz

3 I2C lines
4 USARTS
6 SPI busses
USG UTG
6 LEDS
2.4" Color TFT LCD built-in 

Many of the peripherals can work with DMA and ChibiOS has support for
the STM for using DMA for the peripherals. 

I actually don't have one of these, my robot I built a couple years ago
uses one of the older Discovery Boards, but I used CHibiOS in it. I'll
probably end up getting one of these eventually.

The only gotcha to watch out for with ChibiOS is the licensing. It's
GPL3 with linking exception that states you can only link non-gpl code
with completely unmodified source(something that's hard to do on
embedded platforms sometimes). It's for that reason I've avoided it for
anything I might ever want to sell. The code quality though blows away
many of the types of things you see for Arduino. It's really well done
and intuitive.

I've also used FreeRTOS, and I like ChibiOS better. 

On 2015-04-15 14:08, Pete Soper wrote:
> Speaking of focus, I'd love to be able to just use the mbed
> runtime/rtos environment, overcome or route around its warts and
> leverage the fact that it has an Apache license and appears to support
> a broad range of low power ARM chips.
> 
> To this end I'm curious if anybody is building/using mbed with gcc and
> friends? That is, building it "offline"? Am I silly to use mbed,
> because it's just a ploy to make me realize I can't go down that road
> very far before coughing up a kilobuck or two and sending it to Keil
> (a division of ARM, which is behind mbed)?
> 
> But also, is mbed OK, say for its best-supported dev board, or is it a
> chaotic mess of unqualified source code mutations that is not
> converging? Can folks just put back changes to the mbed source without
> any determination about how much it might hose things up? What's the
> best list or forum to hang out on to develop perspective about mbed
> (e.g. how its rtos rates) so I don't jump to conclusions based on a
> tiny number of samples?
> 
> -Pete
> 
> 
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> TriEmbed web site: http://TriEmbed.org

-- 
Jon Wolfe
Anibit Technology LLC.

https://anibit.com
 

Links:
------
[1] http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/PF259090
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