Atmel SAMA5 support?

[G40]

Hello VisualGDB

I’m having a look at the Atmel SAM A5 evaluation board. Is there any off-the-shelf BSP available?

More generally what does it take to add project support for new processsor/family. I’m only really interested in ARM devices (M3/4 and A5) and would typically use Segger JTAG probes.

Many thanks.

[support]

Hi,

We are not targeting Atmel devices because Atmel provides their own IDE (Atmel Studio). However you can add new devices to VisualGDB by creating a board support package. Essentially you will need the following information:
1. GCC command-line switches for your target (typically -mcpu=cortex-XXX and various definitions).
2. a linker script for your target
3. startup code provided by the device manufacturer.

All those are typically present in the GCC sample projects provided by device manufacturers. In order to integrate these settings into VisualGDB you could try 2 different approaches:
1. Select “Specify flags manually” in the VisualGDB Project Wizard
2. Create your own BSP based on one of our ones stored in %LOCALAPPDATA%VisualGDBEmbeddedBSPs. The information is stored in XML files that could be easily edited.

Let us know if you need more details.

[G40]

I am doing some work with Freescale Vybrid VF50/VF60 boards. it would be great if there was some basic support for these in the Freescale device lists.

More generally, is there any documentation on adding a new Wizard configuration? The ‘developing for legacy ARM devices’ tutorial is useful but it would be good to have a really consistent, repeatable, way of setting up a project.

Thanks again.

Merged with another topic about making custom BSPs

[G40]

Hello Bazis. Any update on this would be most useful. I am hoping that there is some tooling for generating register and IP block definitions (from .h files perhaps?) Or is there an ARM standard for doping this?

Many thanks.

[support]

Hi,

We don’t provide any officially supported tools for generating the BSP packages. However, you can generate one by modifying the existing package XML files in other BSPs. The BSP XML files are produced by the .Net serializer from objects inside the BSPEngine assembly, so you can make a new C# application, reference BSPEngine.dll and manipulate the XML files programmatically:

using BSPEngine;
...
BoardSupportPackage bsp = XmlTools.LoadObject(@"c:xxxBSP.xml");

bsp.SupportedMCUs = ...;

XmlTools.SaveObject(bsp, @"c:yyyBSP.xml");

We do have an internal tool that parses the STM32 headers and generates peripheral register definitions, but it’s highly specific to STM32, as it needs to extract the information from the comments and internal file layout. You can try extracting the register layouts from the Atmel Studio IDE if their license permits doing that.

[G40]

Thanks Bazis I will put this on my todo list

[Author]

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