SparkFun Forums

[biso]

Dears,

I am using lpc2294 for my project. a friend recommended me to use ULINK as it is suitable with KEIL free Embedded IDE another recommended JLINK.

I am confused, what do you recommend?


Thanks,
BISO

[OLIMEX]

Ulink and Jlink are products which are binded to Keil and IAR commercial compilers
if you decide to work with Keil yuo will need Ulink if you decide to work with IAR you have to get Jlink
I've never heard for free Keil software perhaps this is some demo limited memory or time IDE like the kickstart from IAR
Best regards
Tsvetan

[biso]

Dear Tsvetan,

Thanks a lot for your response.

so, what do you recommend to me to buy and what are the free GOOD alternatives for embedded IDEs


Thanks

BISO

[newtr]

Note that the olimx ARM-JTAG work good with IAR (I don't try it with KEIL), and you save more than 10 time the price of the J-Link...

[ghazan.haider]

I use the parallel port JTAG from Olimex with Rowley Crossworks. It's the best overall deal. I spent weeks trying to learn and work the gcc/yagarto setup with openocd. The problem is you have to do and know alot to setup the debug system and the gdb simulator does not simulate most ARM devices throughly enough. The interface is difficult and so are the error/warning messages from openocd/gcc. It's wonderful that it's free and one day it'll be better than the rest of the solutions (like Linux) but it's not so right now.

Forget about the Eclipse IDE. I spent two full days trying to make it work and absolutely gave up on it. I'd rather have spent that effort on an embedded project itself.

I tried and loved Keil. But they would not take the Wiggler JTAG and I did not want to spend the money for both the license and the JTAG.

Then I tried Rowley's and felt sorry for not having tried it. Everything worked the first time, worked well and fast and in a simple way. I'm kind of glad it uses gcc since in the future when the gcc setup is good, I can move my projects easily. It takes the cheapo Wiggler JTAG and it's more reliable than the last time I tried openocd (I'm sure it was a configuration issue that I didn't understand well). The license for personal use is real cheap and the next version will accept Olimex's USB JTAG devices too.

On the interface side, I liked Rowley's and Keil both. Rowley's was better in that it just worked and was simpler (while being everything I needed). I know the Keil compiler makes smaller/faster code especially regarding floating point. That's the only thing that bugs me.

I wish Rowley's would release the 1.7 version faster so I could get the USB JTAG and work on my projects on my laptop at a Starbucks somewhere.

[Cannibal]

I would recommend neither Ulink or Jlink for the following reason - There are far less expensive tools out there that work with many products:

Olimex Arm JTAG also works with Rowley Crossworks for ARM

(and according to support, version 1.7 of crossworks which is due out soon will support the Olimex USB JTAG devices).

[dshuman]

I tried and loved Keil. But they would not take the Wiggler JTAG and I did not want to spend the money for both the license and the JTAG.

Keil supports the ARM RDI debugging interface, which is provided by the freeware H-JAG for Wiggler clones. Are you saying that you could not get your Wiggler to work using Keil's ARM RDI debugging interface? In my own case, I have found the H-JTAG RDI interface to be the simplest and easiest way to use a Wiggler clone with ARM's SDT 2.51.

--Dave

[ghazan.haider]

I did indeed try that. H-JTAG did not work once for me. It keeps crashing on connect. I had the latest version of each tool back then. In the forums there were more people for whom H-JTAG did not work than for whom it did, so I left it.

[dshuman]

I did indeed try that. H-JTAG did not work once for me. It keeps crashing on connect. I had the latest version of each tool back then. In the forums there were more people for whom H-JTAG did not work than for whom it did, so I left it.

OK, I do recall reading about some people having problems with it.

Not by crashing, but just failing to connect at startup because it could not read the JTAG ID. Actually, I never ever saw it crash. I did see the connect problem myself though. It just turned out to be a simple misconfiguration problem on my part, because I was using the Olimex Wiggler clone, which is not identical to a Wiggler. Twentyone, the author of H-JTAG eventually had to put up a GIF image on his site that showed a picture of the correct configuration settings for the Olimex Wiggler clone. So, in my own case, it still seems to be the fastest and easiest to use Wiggler driver with any of my setups that require ARM's RDI. I use OpenOCD for driving a USB JTAG interface, but that does not do any good for the ARM debug tools that I have because it does not support RDI.

--Dave