Hello,
Mbed OS 5.15 supports the MSP432 controller from TI (see …/targets/TARGETS_TI/…).
I have written this port using the MSP432 Launchpad as a test platform.
Since this information is nowhere mentioned in the release notes, I would like to
distribute this information via this post. It would be great if other developers could
try out this port and report their experiences/enhancements.
BR, Andreas
Hi Andreas,
Thank you for your efforts, I certainly know the effort it takes to do this.
I can’t find your platform/ target page other than Targets in Mbed github.
Do you have a platform page, for instance:
https://os.mbed.com/platforms/Teensy-3-1/
What board would I get and does it have the usual Mbed DAP functionality or some other way to download/debug program code?
Also how can I do the ‘Add to your Mbed Compiler’.
For example the Teensy3.1/3.2 platform has since disappeared from the Mbed platform page along with some other platforms. So you may have a battle to get this added here.
This is understandable for the the Teensy platform due to the lack of Mbed standard DAP functionality which it simply does not and can not have. So the TI platform must have this to qualify for platform page listing.
To be perfectly honest with you TI themselves should make some effort to do this, its in their interest and would be beneficial from a commercial point for them to do so.
BR
Paul
Hello Paul,
well, there is no platform page because the typical board you use for the MSP432 (e.g. the MSP432 Launchpad https://www.ti.com/tool/MSP-EXP432P401R ) does not have the Mbed DAP functionality. TI uses their own debug interface, which supports DAP, but not the mass-storage functionality to flash the board and also not the functionality to auto-detect the device. Both would be crutial for a full Mbed integration.
I am teaching microcontroller classes on a regular basis using the above mentioned MSP432 Launchpad. TI is quite helpful in supporting academic institutions with hardware. Also they have a nice so called “eduational boosterpack” https://www.ti.com/tool/BOOSTXL-EDUMKII , which I definitely need to do s.th. reasonable with my students, because we have no sufficient lab-space at our university. I have written my own C++ -based RTOS for this platform, which works quite well. Last summer a student mentionen MBed OS, because he was doing a project with a STM32 board. So I spend some time to mostly copy-paste my own drivers for GPIO/I2C/SPI etc. and did a MBed port as a little exercise. These drivers all use the hardware directly without TIs so called DriverLib, which I personally do not like very much, because it sometimes obfuscates the functionality of the hardware and is more complicated to use than simply programming the registers. Besides that it has horrible long method names like GPIO_getEnabledInterruptStatus(GPIO_PORT_P6).
Programming a MSP432 launchpad is quite easy using TI’s DSLite tool. I simply build a MBed binary and download it with this tool, which is fast and reliable. If anybody needs help in this area I can provide support.
Yes, if TI would put some effort in MBed OS, there could even be a full support for most of their existing Cortex-M based boards. Most debug interfaces are also based on Cortex-M processors (for the MSP432 launchpad it is a Tiva-C controller). Actually I was thinking about writing another MBed port for Tiva-C,
and then try to build the DAPLink software, which might already support gcc/g++ (formerly only the ARM-compiler was supported). Doing this one could flash the debug interface itself to get a fully MBed-compliant TI microcontroller board. But since TI is obviously not taking any effort in this area, this might be a fantasy forever.
BR, Andreas
Any good news about mso432 on mbed os?
Well, as I said in my original mail, MSP432 (launchpad) support is already contained in latest versions of mbed OS. The only thing which is needed is to manually upload the binary to the board with TI’s DSLite tool. Let me know if you need some help in this area.
Currently I don’t have the time to work on the debugging/downloading topic using mbed DAP.
BR, Andreas