$50 Non-Commercial use license for the JumpStart Debugger

[richardman]

EEVBlog forumers: ask and you shall receive. We have added a non-commercial use license to the JumpStart Debugger for $50:
https://c4everyone.com/index.php?option=com_opencart&Itemid=148&route=product/category&path=17

You can use it with a "regular" non-commercial compiler license ($99) or you can purchase the JumpStart MicroBox kit for $99 which includes the NC compiler license, an Arduino compatible ST-Nucleo board, the ACE (Arduino Compatible Education) shield, the "C 4 Everyone" ebook, and using the JumpStart API, you can get started programming with Cortex-M programming in minutes.

THERE IS MORE! No, seriously, for the month of November, take an additional 10% off: after you add item(s) to the cart, before checkout, click on the Shopping Cart icon to go to the Shopping Cart page, then enter the code SUNNYNOV to receive the discount.

Our demo is fully functional for 45 days, but don't wait too long. Nov ends in two weeks!

Thank you!

[neslekkim]

cool, just waiting for the license now..

Edit: And I'm in:

[ez24]

Can you explain what this is

The Arduino Compatible Education (ACE™) Shield


- Do you make it?
- What does Arduino compatible mean?

I am really new to this and just starting to understand what editor, compiler, and debugger mean.  I do not have a good understanding of all the IDEs for MCUs.

I used an Arduino once and really liked the IDE part - edit and load (compile and upload) in what I think is one step.  But I want to learn real C and so I avoid Arduino and AVRs because I do not want to end up in  an Arduino environment by accident.

So when you say Arduino compatible do you mean the physical hardware, maybe just the physical connection?   Is there anything related to Arduino programming?  I do not want to end up having to use Arduino code, libraries, etc.  No Arduino IDE, going to their website, reference to them, etc.

For example can this be plugged into the Arduino Compatible Education (ACE™) Shield

http://www.amazon.com/Arduino-Motor-Shield-R3/dp/B006UTE70E/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1447800553&sr=8-4&keywords=arduino+shield

And use real C to play with it using your IDE ?

thanks

[neslekkim]

The Arduino Compatible Education (ACE™) Shield

I don't know if there are toolchain setups that enables you to use Arduino IDE to code against the STM32 Nucleo board, but it is still Arduino "compatible" in the sense that it have same/similar pinout and stuff.. And the ACE board plugs onto that.
For me, that is enough.. But I guess your shield also should be able to be connected to an Nucleo for use, but I guess it depends on if the right pinout is correct (Arduino made a mess of the various changes they did IMHO.. v3 pinout and what they called it..)

[richardman]

Hi EZ24:

Yes, we - ImageCraft, not neslekkim :-) make the ACE Shield. Info on the ACE Shield and other stuff here:
https://c4everyone.com/index.php/download/microbox-and-cortex-m-docs

The ACE Shield can be used with any Arduino compatible board, but then you will have to write your own driver/libraries. If you purchase it with our JumpStart MicroBox kit ($99, plus 10% off right now), we provide examples and JumpStart API that make it very easy to get started with the ACE Shield and indeed any STM32F0xx and STM32F4xx programming. The above website also has info on the JumpStart API. Take a look and see.

Our compiler tools is full C with some C++ to implement the JumpStart API. It's also fast. Neslekkim mentions that while it is not a comparative test, the compile/link feel very fast, under 10 seconds for a couple of test projects he was doing. Anyway, the demo is fully functional for 45 days, so give it a try.
https://c4everyone.com/index.php/download/demo-software

[richardman]

BTW, it should be trivial to write a driver for the Motor Shield using the JumpStart API. Indeed it would be educational. We are planning on writing a small book that teaches embedded programming, a complement to the MicroBox doc and the "C 4 Everyone" ebook.

[neslekkim]

Our compiler tools is full C with some C++ to implement the JumpStart API. It's also fast. Neslekkim mentions that while it is not a comparative test, the compile/link feel very fast, under 10 seconds for a couple of test projects he was doing. Anyway, the demo is fully functional for 45 days, so give it a try.
https://c4everyone.com/index.php/download/demo-software

And the blink/helloworld projecs, compiles at 1 second.. this is almost back to the days of turbopascal..

[nctnico]

Just tried GCC + Eclipse. Takes 300ms to compile a real world project.

[neslekkim]

Just tried GCC + Eclipse. Takes 300ms to compile a real world project.

Which one? FreeRTOS takes 5-8 secs.. but again, it depends very on what hardware we have..

[MT]

BTW, it should be trivial to write a driver for the Motor Shield using the JumpStart API. Indeed it would be educational. We are planning on writing a small book that teaches embedded programming, a complement to the MicroBox doc and the "C 4 Everyone" ebook.

That's a good idea, a small book supporting the tool and embedded programming in general with emphasis
of skipping the whole Cimsis, HAL whatever crap.There is a market for such small condensed packages.

[richardman]

That's a good idea, a small book supporting the tool and embedded programming in general with emphasis
of skipping the whole Cimsis, HAL whatever crap.There is a market for such small condensed packages.

Sounds good. One thing I don't like about the existing Arduino/Embedded System books is that they try to teach both embedded systems and C at the same time. I think it's much better to split them up. Obviously the embedded book will need to cover C a bit, but it's so much easy to say things like "for details on variable declaration, see chapter X of the book 'C for Everyone'"

I will get on to it once the ebook conversion for "C 4 Everyone" is completely done, which should be within 24 hours :-) It turns out that there are a lot of limitations with ebook formatting and our using Google Doc for writing (primarily for its collaboration features) is dumb due to its bad handling of fonts  The next one will be written using Word from the start.

[nctnico]

Just tried GCC + Eclipse. Takes 300ms to compile a real world project.

Which one? FreeRTOS takes 5-8 secs.. but again, it depends very on what hardware we have..

One of my own projects (yes: it is a complete build from all files in the project from scratch); it compiles to around 12kB of ARM code and it consists of around 15 c and header files in the project and various system header files. But this in on Linux. Windows is extremely slow when it comes to starting processes and doing disk caching so compiling large software projects will always be slow.

[neslekkim]

Just tried GCC + Eclipse. Takes 300ms to compile a real world project.

Which one? FreeRTOS takes 5-8 secs.. but again, it depends very on what hardware we have..

One of my own projects (yes: it is a complete build from all files in the project from scratch); it compiles to around 12kB of ARM code and it consists of around 15 c and header files in the project and various system header files. But this in on Linux. Windows is extremely slow when it comes to starting processes and doing disk caching so compiling large software projects will always be slow.

Ok, an 5 second build I did now, prodced 42K of code, I havent found any statistics of the proejcts yet, but the build log tells me that it consists of 42 .c files, and similar amounts of .h files.
I guess that is more than acceptable..