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11 years, 1 month ago.
My project and everything is new.
Hello,
I made some small projects with Microchip, and now looking for different options. I found a nice chip STM32L1 to suit my needs, then start looking for IDE and come to this site. After registration I could go to Compiler then to select platform.
There are many development boards available. I don’t want to write a program for a development board but for a particular chip, and circuit I want to design, so I am not sure where to start. How do I debug program, can I go in steps, can I see memory registers? I am confused with minimal circuit requirements, I assume I need a switch so the bootloader can be started. Do I have to use the bootloader pre-programmed? Can I just program it from mbed?
1 Answer
11 years, 1 month ago.
The difference between programming for a board and a particular chip in mbed is just that there are some aliases for pin names available depending on the board. But if you use an identical microcontroller to that of the board, it works fine on a custom PCB too. Sometimes it is possible to manually adjust some files to also make it work on a smaller version of the same MCU.
If you want to really debug, go in steps through code, see registers, etc, you will need a real debugger. Almost all mbed boards have that capability, but you do need to use an offline compiler for it.
Finally the bootloader used is in a secondary interface IC, it is not on the target MCU itself! So you will need to use your own programmer (anything which can program bin files will do if you use the online compiler, but again for stepping through the code you need an offline compiler), or you can buy one of the mbed boards and redirect the programming lines (SWD) to your own target. The STM/Freescale boards all allow for this, and part of the NXP boards too.