Why is small-scale ARM development such a pain

I don't find it a pain at all. I've used Rowley Crossworks with either Row= ley or Segger JTAG devices, and it all works quite nicely. No one-pin debu= gging, but I don't consider that lack a pain. And I'd give my neighbor's r= ight arm if AVR Studio had the equivalent of Rowley's tasking library.

Look harder. Most ARM toolchain vendors (Keil, IAR etc.) support the Cortex-M0/M3 and debugging over the SWD (single-wire debug) interface.

-a

Back in the old days we used to debug with a logic analyser and an ICE the size of a small house. The code was programmed into UV eraseable EPROMS. We could manage about 4 edit/compile/debug cycles per day. If you think ARM development is a pain, you don't know real pain :)

To be serious though, the ARM dev systems I have used are pretty good. You have to pay a bit of learning curve for your 32 bits though. I would avoid anything Eclipse based or that requires external gdb servers though.

I think you mis-spelled LED.

Who doesn't remember the smell of the ozone from the UV eraser!

Maybe you need to go next door for a little management training solution !

For starters, one man's "painless" is another man's "painful". :)

You had ICE and a logic analyzer? Lucky pup. I remember a lot of projects that were developed using the just "edit-compile-burn-crash" cycle with UV EPROMs. If you were lucky you had a spare port pin you could toggle and an storage oscilloscope to look at the pin. Storage scopes were rare and expensive, so more often that not you had to settle for "I/O pin debugging" that was limitted to stuff in loops that could run fast enough to light up the phospor frequently enough to be visible.

And we had to walk to work and back in a blizzard -- up hill both ways!

As one of the developers I worked with used to say "the best debugger is looking at source code and thinking".

I tried AVR studio for a while and found it slow, clumsy, and overly restrictive. Add in the fact that you had to use Windows to run, and I dropped it pretty quickly and went back to an occasional diagnostic "printf" and sometimes command-line gdb via JTAG or the like.

If you really want something more like AVR studio, a lot of people seem to like Rowley CrossWorks. It's vendor and OS neutral, which wins them a lot of points in my book.

I also know people who try to use Eclipse for Embedded work...

Because you haven't gone out and built your own gnu toolset (Google for "summon-arm-toolchain") along with your own startup code, then gone on to have a ball?

gnu arm tool chain, gnu debugger, Eclipse -- joy.

or Segger JTAG devices, and it all works quite nicely. No one-pin debugging,

Do you mean serial wire debug (SWD)? If so, it is supported. Check under "target interface type" in the JTAG properties.

Or s/Eclips/emacs/g.

The point is you have lots of choices. It's not a one-suit-fits everybody situation.

development

Kind of. If we take another step backward, it took three quarters of a hour to feed the assembler into a Nova 1200 or PDP-8 using an ASR-33 and paper tape (provided the reader did not make an error). The net effect was one edit/assemble/debug cycle per day, if you were lucky.

anything

I'm happy with the GNU toolset and an editor (kedit on Linux etc). For debugging OpenOCD and a wiggler perform well enough. A correction cycle is usually less than 10 minutes.

Put simply, because when I want to produce a metal part, nobody expects me to build a lathe and mill first.

Long gone. Now a holistic health center. Should I go there instead?

Jim, I know where you are coming from and I agree, so I apologise for not having given a really practical reply before.

For the direct question, and at the risk of stating the obvious, Atmel have a different business model to ARM. Atmel sell silicon and see an advantage to providing a good free IDE for developers. ARM don't sell silicon, they sell IP to companies who make silicon and then sell tools to end-users. Since both companies seem to be doing pretty well, it appears they have chosen market strategies that work well for them.

The implicit question is what ARM IDE is as good as AvrStudio? Not used AvrStudio for a while, but I have recently evaluated Keil, IAR, CodeSourcery, Crossworks, CooCox, as well as Eclipse+CDT+gcc+gdb, and by default vanilla text editor + gcc + printf. This is not a comprehensive survey by any means only a sample of the main players.

I assume you are using windows, you don't mention whether it is for personal or professional use. CodeSourcery and CooCox are Eclipse based, so we eliminate those. I marginally prefer IAR, but my employer went for Keil, Keil is perfectly adequate for my needs. For hobby stuff I am liking CrossWorks. I have tried Eclipse + free tools, some swear by them, but they do not suit me.

You could also look at software bundled with dev boards e.g: mBed (NXP), Xpresso (NXP, CodeRed), STM Discovery (ST, Atollic?). These and the other commercial IDEs above all have limited free versions or evaluation versions.

I doubt there is an ARM IDE to exactly match AvrStudio, but IMO there are several IDEs that are perfectly usable. The caveat being that the better ones are not free for non-trivial applications.

and there you have a nice summary as why " small-scale ARM development such a pain".

It's the classic falls between two stools problem :

Atmel sell chips, and so long as their BIG customers have a solution, they are ok. ARM _sell_ tools, so they are in no hurry to help small scale / open source offerings. Why would they lower their profits ?

So something like AVR Studio, which Atmel MUST have to sell AVR8 & AVR32s, will always be ahead of any small scale ARM offerings.

There may be some good news, as Atmel's newest offering is now renamed "Atmel Studio 6", and it includes ARM debug flows.

I think you may need to buy their SAM-ICE, and it is not clear how 'other brands' might work, but they do now claim ARM support in Studio.

Press release is also sketchy on Simulator support for ARM. ( WIP? )

-jg

What's emacse? Is than a newer version that's even harder to figure out how to get out of?

IP

pain".

It doesn't have to be. Rowley sells their full kit, including the RTOS, for only $150 for a personal, non-commercial license. The deeper innards are accessible to those who want them but it's pretty much install, load the "package" for the target processor, and go. Decent IDE and debugger and it supports the cheap Olimex JTAG dongles out of the box as well as a score of others. I can't imagine how it could be any more pain free.

Get a $30 header board from Olimex or one of their resellers and it's game on.

#disclaimer: just a customer (full commercial license, though)

Nah. Emacsis easy to get out of:

ps -aux | grep emacs

kill -9

-- Les Cargill

Touché!

IP

pain".

I'll definitely give it a try. Thanks.