J-Link Lite - XMC Relax Kit and 3rd party microcontrollers

[poorchava]

Hello,

I'm considering purchasing the Infineon XMC4500 Relax Kit eval board. It's similar to STM32 discovery, LPCExpresso, Kinetis Freedom etc. The difference is that all manufacturers use a proprietary debugger on their boards, but Infineon has integrated a J-Link Lite onto their board. According to Segger's website J-Link lite is equivalent to normal J-Link but cannot be sold separately.

The question is: has anybody here tried to use this J-Link on XMC Relax board with a 3rd party microcontroller? J-link seems to be supported by all IDEs (minus NXP....) and I'd love to have a single debugger for all cortex microcontrollers, especially that I mainly use STM32's and the ST-Link they provide on discovery boards is crap (massive driver-related problems on Win7 and USB3.0, crashes, lockups, breaks debug sessions etc).

[dannyf]

I don't have any experience with the particular hardware.

You may also try LPC-Link (2?) that can be reprogrammed by the user into a j-link or other programmers / debuggers. JLink EDU is another option.

There are rumors about newer versions of JLink (based on a STM32F2 chip) floating around so you want to know if yours supports that.

If you are brave, there are ARM OM boards out there - this is a STM32F based programmer / debugger board that Segger sells to be integrated into a user board.

As to ST discovery, I have zero complaint about them.

[poorchava]

I don't have any experience with the particular hardware.

You may also try LPC-Link (2?) that can be reprogrammed by the user into a j-link or other programmers / debuggers. JLink EDU is another option.

There are rumors about newer versions of JLink (based on a STM32F2 chip) floating around so you want to know if yours supports that.

If you are brave, there are ARM OM boards out there - this is a STM32F based programmer / debugger board that Segger sells to be integrated into a user board.

As to ST discovery, I have zero complaint about them.

J-Link EDU is an option, although it'a a bit pricey (I can have it for ~50€). Decent option for sure, but I'm looking for a more economical approach.

As for LPCLink2 firmware replacement, according to Segger's website this firmware

Supports all ARM based NXP devices which are also supported by J-Link Lite.

which may mean that it's locked to LPCs, which I am not particularily interested in because of weak support in CoIDE and other free tools (which is a direct result of NXPs unwillingness to cooperate with OpenOCD project developers).

Problems with STLink debugger are widely described on the net. They are cause by the fact, that the debugger at first presents itself as a mass storage device. I've found a way to make it work, which is to connect STLink, wait until it initializes as MSD, then uninstall it from device manager, run the STVP software and then connect the STLink. It then installs the proper driver and other software like STLink Utility or OpenOCD can use it too. Otherwise - no tool detected. It also "hangs" during debug sessions when paused for a longer while, program counter doesn't increment and when you look into registers, they all show the same value which for me is a sign that the debugger crapped out rather than the MCU itself. Just annoying.

[quint]

Problems with STLink debugger are widely described on the net. They are cause by the fact, that the debugger at first presents itself as a mass storage device. I've found a way to make it work, which is to connect STLink, wait until it initializes as MSD, then uninstall it from device manager, run the STVP software and then connect the STLink. It then installs the proper driver and other software like STLink Utility or OpenOCD can use it too. Otherwise - no tool detected. It also "hangs" during debug sessions when paused for a longer while, program counter doesn't increment and when you look into registers, they all show the same value which for me is a sign that the debugger crapped out rather than the MCU itself. Just annoying.

Are you referring to the STLink V2.1 which is on the new mbed enabled STM Nucleo boards?  I've used at least a half dozen different STM32 Discovery board models (on Mac, PC and Linux) and none of the STLink debuggers have mounted as MSD.  In general, they work great, not only on the Discovery target chip but also on other outboard targets (from ST and LPC) for me.  The only STLink I've seen come up as a MSD is the Nucleo one and that is, AFAIK, to be compatible with the mbed way of loading firmware.

[poorchava]

I'm using one on the STM32VLDiscovery board (the one with STM32F100RBT6). It's STLink v1.

[dannyf]

The only problem I have had with the various st boards is that I have to manually plug them in to the usb port.

[dannyf]

none of the STLink debuggers have mounted as MSD.

The STM8S and STM32F1 discovery boards do that.

[poorchava]

It's because of the screwed up communication scheme - they use vendor specific commands in SCSI set to haul all the JTAG traffic over the USB. The device descriptors are totally crafted, all the responses are premade so that Windows XP won't complain too much, but any other system that doesn't behave exactly how XP does will pose problems. Eg. it shows itself as 32MB device despite having only 3 html files. If you try to write anything to it it crashes, throws errors or simply drops connection.

STLink v2 is also done that way, but a bit more clever so systems don't complain that much.

Check this out: http://code.google.com/p/arm-utilities/wiki/STLinkDownload

[dannyf]

Yes, the links are only there for you to launch a browser - I don't know why anyone would want to write anything to it.

Some LPC chips do allow dropping files onto the MSD as a way to program the chip. I am not aware of any ST doing that in stock forms.