GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain

Having trouble getting a working toolchain for LPC2129 ARM7

Asked by Mike P

I have always found the toolchain for the LPC2129 to be troublesome. Each installation tends to be a terrible experience. A big part of the problem is that I don't do enough of this and am more accustomed to Arduino and also Win32 development.

my project has a Philips LPC2129 ARM7 and I have been using GNU GCC with GNUDE to build this bare metal project. I last built firmware for this target in 2013 and that installation of CYGWIN is long gone. Better yet, my notes from that time are weak. I blame myself for that...

I dread working with ARM and am almost ready to discard everything related to these MCUs because the toolchain is such a problem for me but I have too much invested in them to give up quite yet.

The project has all the parts, including a linker script, a make file and a "start.s" file.

It seems clear also that because it's not from the Cortex family, the toolchain isn't available already assembled.

Can someone point me in the direction of working instructions to build such a project with GCC?

I believe that it's better to ask for useful, working instructions than describe the assorted problems I have getting the compiler to work in *any* way.

My development computer is Windows (10). So far, I have installed CygWin and GNUDE.

The project is small but no so small that I can use the free Keil compiler. The un-crippled version of the Keil compiler costs more than my car.

GCC has worked fine for me if only I can get it working once more...

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Tejas Belagod (belagod-tejas) said : 		#1

OK, lets take this one step at a time.

What ARM toolchain are you referring to here? If its one of the toolchains we ship here, please could you provide us the following details:

1. What's the toolchain version?
2. What and how are you trying to build? Command-line options, makefiles etc?
3. Did you know that you *don't* need to install Cygwin for our Windows toolchains to work? It is intended to work natively. OTOH, it also works on Cygwin, so you can have makefiles etc.
4. Any more information you're able to provide us would be useful in guiding you through the building process.

Thanks,
Tejas.

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Mike P (x-raymike) said : 		#2

Thank you for your reply.

>What ARM toolchain are you referring to here? If its one of the toolchains we ship here, please could you provide us the following details:

>1. What's the toolchain version?

I've been using the latest CygWin with its GCC and GNUDE. That has been sufficient to build the project since I also never saw the C runtime working either. That headache caused me to write my own string handling routines.

>2. What and how are you trying to build? Command-line options, makefiles etc?

have been using a make file.

I don't think there were any command line parameters.

the resulting object code (using Intel hex format) will be downloaded into the LPC2129. it does contain some data (rasterized fonts) which do take up some space.

>3. Did you know that you *don't* need to install Cygwin for our Windows toolchains to work? It is intended to work natively. OTOH, it also works on Cygwin, so you can have makefiles etc.

I didn't know that! would very much like to skip cygwin and find a toolchain that is easy to set up.

>4. Any more information you're able to provide us would be useful in guiding you through the building process.

It's just a basic bare metal embedded project. It's not a very complex project and has no special requirements. One requirement is that the tools need to be very inexpensive/free. It's a great microcontroller but it's only useful for me if I can get a toolchain working again.

If I could have a working toolchain with a simple project, I could certainly take my project and migrate it into the working project--that's another way to get this done.

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Mike P (x-raymike) said : 		#3

I saw "Pre-built GNU toolchain from ARM Cortex-M & Cortex-R processors (Cortex-M0/M0+/M3/M4/M7/M23/M33, Cortex-R4/R5/R7/R8)." on the web site but have understood that the Cortex line of processors use a different (easier) toolchain than the family that the LPC2129 belongs to.

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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said : 		#4

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.