SW Tools / Don't make the mistakes I have: part 1

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john k2ox
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SW Tools / Don't make the mistakes I have: part 1

Post by john k2ox » Sun Nov 16, 2014 9:18 pm

Hi RedPitayans,

If you are interested in making changes to either the ARM code(PS) or the FPGA(PL) and have tried to follow the process on the Wiki, I feel for you.

The major problem with the Wiki is that the info is not segregated to support individual user environments. Windows, Linux, GUI or command line development. The Wiki has most of what you need and way too much of what you don't. I'll outline what I did and then let you know what I should have done.

I started on the 'Main' page, then went to the 'Developer Guide' and followed the text to set up things for windows. After cloning the Git repo, installing the GCC tools for the ARM processor, setting the environmental variables everything seemed to be going smoothly. The next step is to install 'Eclipse' for windows.

I liked the step by step screen shots in the Eclipse setup in the wiki. Unfortunately, it didn't run. I went back verified I had done things correctly. Over and over and over again. It was very frustrating. I thought my major challenge was going to be learning Verilog, DSP techniques and the peculiarities of Zynq. Nope, I couldn't get a 'Hello World' program going.

Then I started looking elsewhere, Zedboard, Zynq Easy Steps, Xilinx ...

Since Vivado also runs on Linux and the creators of the RedPitaya seemed to have developed in Linux I decided to switch gears and move to Linux. I downloaded Xilinx Vivado on my Debian Linux machine. Did that work? Nope. It would get past the second install step. Vivado is only supported on the paid for Red Hat Linux Enterprise version of Linux. YMMV

Another popular website uses a Linux Virtual machine running on a Mac. I started down that road, but quickly put the brakes on. I decided to go back to windows because my most powerful PC has Win7 on an I7 machine.

The first issue to tackle was that Eclipse couldn't find the GCC ARM compiler tool chain. I had run the install tests as directed from the Wiki and everything was fine, but Eclipse wasn't happy.
It's obvious to me now that the Wiki creator never tried following the procedure on a fresh machine. Since you are the user of your PC, not Crt, placing 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Linaro\gcc-linaro-arm-linux-gnueabi-2012.03\bin' in the 'user' environmental path doesn't work. It needs to be added to below to the 'system' environmental path. The next issue was setting up the debugger, in the step "Open debug configurations window: Run->Run Configurations" brings up a dialog screen similar to that in the setup description, but it is missing some tabs. The instruction is wrong. The correct one is "Open debug configurations window: Run->Run Debug Configurations.

The last hold up was that 'Eclipse' couldn't find the stdio... header files. I did a file search and found them and added the path to the project settings. Ya Hoooo, it built.
I simply edited a string in generate.c to add my name. I clicked the 'run' and it did. Then debug and it worked also. Finally, I'm getting somewhere. Or so I thought.

Guess what? As it turns out I should not have ever installed 'Eclipse' in the first place. In, SW Tools / Don't make the mistakes I have: part 2, I'll explain why.

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