4 replies to this topic

[martin2250]

Hello everybody,

 

I recently bought an Arduino UNO, after experimenting with my Netduino+2 for some months. The most important reason was speed, toggling a Pin on my Netduino @170MHz i would only get 35kHz at max, whereas the Uno would give me 8MHz. Now Arduino released the Due, which also uses ARM architecture, a Cortex M-3. Would it be possible to make the Netduino apperar as a Serial Port on the Computer and accept native Programs like a Due? Essentially it's a similar Processor, just with some more storage and an FPU + some other new features.

I don't mind loosing object-oriented programming at all, since I can just reupload Netduino Firmware again. But it would be nice to have at Serial and maybe Ethernet available.

For a start, it would already be a huge success if it would just 'work', without any libraries, timers, etc. set up (I'm fairly familiar with using registers for that now).

 

Greetings.

[Chris Walker]

Hi martin2250, The Arduino libraries are closely-coupled with the individual microcontroller architectures that the boards run on...and the more feature-rich third-party libraries which access microcontroller registers need to be compiled against each of those targets. If you're looking for speed, pick up an STLink/V2 and the Kickstart version of Keil's ARM compiler and IDE. Or the free version of IAR for ARM. Or GCC and an open-source debugger. You can get the faster speed and higher quality of Netduino hardware without needing to use the Arduino libraries (as ST provides a lot of core libraries and quite a few examples). We've included header holes for MiniJTAG on every Netduino gen2 board. If you're looking to reproduce projects written in the Arduino's programming language and using its libraries...you'll probably want to stick to Arduino or Arduino clone hardware. Does that help? Chris

[martin2250]

Hi Chris,

 

as I already mentioned, I don't need any libraries. My main concern was the simple upload process with just a virtual COM-port. I guess I could compile a .hex file and flash it with SAM-BA, but that would be much slower, and on my PC/Board configuration, it takes multiple attempts most times (uploaded the Netduino firmware again after bricking it with PWM). The Cortex-M4 already has integrated USB support, so a small bootloader that runs for ~5 seconds when the reset button was pressed, appears as a CDC device and accepts new firmware should be possible.

My idea was to use Atmel Studio with gcc, and upload the code without having to mess with the hex files etc.

 

thanks for your time

 

Martin

[NooM]

coocox is what you want i guess. ill use it for my stm32f4's. it also supports different brands (maybe even the sam3x - due)

 

idk that bootloader stuff, i use the stlink v2 on my discovery board as programmer/debugger

[Chris Walker]

Hi Martin, Just FYI...when you solder a MiniJTAG header to the board you can upload your code directly from the programming IDE. Chris