What's New in Armaide v2

Version 2.3 © 2006-2010 CFB Software
Last Updated 6 Jan 2010

Oberon-07 Language Extensions

Local Dynamic Arrays

Local dynamic arrays of any type can be declared within a procedure:

  VAR
    weights: ARRAY OF REAL;
    alarms: ARRAY OF Event; 

The number of elements (i.e. length) of the array is determined at runtime:

  NEW(weights, count);

Interrupt Handlers

An Oberon-07 interrupt handler is a normal procedure which has an offset specification in square brackets instead of a list of parameters:

  PROCEDURE TimerHandler[4];

For more information refer to the Oberon-07 Language Extensions section of the Armaide document Oberon for LPC2000 Microcontrollers.

Resources

Typically on a PC system, large quantities of constant data (e.g. the definition of a font, a bitmap image etc.) would be stored in files to be read at runtime.  A file system is often not available on the smaller embedded systems targeted by Armaide, so a different approach is used:

• After the Armaide linker has linked all of the object files <module>.arm into the executable program, it looks for the corresponding 'resource' data files named <module>.res file.
• The resource files are appended to the executable to be stored in Flash ROM when the program is uploaded.
• Library ResData contains functions to access the constant resource data from the Oberon-07 program. 

For more information refer to the Resource Data section of the Armaide document Oberon for LPC2000 Microcontrollers.

Supported Targets

The target processors supported by Armaide are:

• LPC2000
• LPC2101, LPC2102, LPC2103
• LPC2104, LPC2105, LPC2106
• LPC2142, LPC2144, LPC2146, LPC2148
• LPC2212, LPC2214
• LPC2364, LPC2366, LPC2368, LPC2378

Libraries

• Module ResData contains functions to access the constant resource data (see above) from the Oberon-07 program.
• LPC.Mod includes more of the LPC2000 family common constant definitions e.g. Timer1. 
• Modules LPC and Main have been modified to support the additional processors. Existing applications developed with earlier versions of Armaide should be recompiled and relinked.
• Module Traps now includes default interrupt handlers for the internal interrupts Undefined Instruction, Data Abort, and Prefetch Abort. These are installed at startup time when Main.Init calls Traps.Init, the only function exported from Traps.
• The Evaluation Edition only includes the library modules needed by the runtime system and included examples.
• Additional library modules included in the Standard and Professional Editions are Math, Random, and ResData.
• Source code of all library modules (except the compiler-dependent MAU and FPU) is included in the Professional Edition.    

Linker

• The link map includes details of the linked resources, if any.
• The range of crystal frequencies allowed in link options is 10000000Hz to 25000000Hz (i.e. 10Mhz to 25Mhz) except for the LPC2378 family of processors (12Mhz and 20Mhz only).
• The link map includes the full pathnames of all of the imported modules, the target processor and crystal frequency.

Examples

• The TestTraps example demonstrates a single runtime error - #6: String too long or destination string too short.
• An example of a timer-driven interrupt handler can be built from the source code files IRQTimer.mod and IRQBlinker.mod

Technical Support

• Access to the Armaide developers via the Armaide Technical Support webpage is now also available for Evaluation Edition users.

Documentation

• A new chapter Programming Conventions and Guidelines is included in the document Oberon for LPC2000 Microcontrollers.

Problems fixed

v2.3

• Fixed printing from the menu. Was only a problem on Windows 7 and Windows Vista.
• Latin-1 characters > 7FX can be used in Oberon-07 comments, strings and character constants. Elsewhere they result in the compiler error "bad character".
• Main.SetupPLL2300: Corrected NSEL left-shift value when calculating LPC.PLLCFG. 
• Global and multi-dimensional dynamic arrays are reported as compile-time errors.
• Prevent exception when compiling a set range with 30 as the upper bound e.g. CONST s = {0..30};

v2.2

• Corrected definitions of FIO1* in LPC2378.mod
• Library function Math.Cos(x) now returns correct results for negative values of x
• The compiler reports an error if a local procedure is assigned to a global procedure variable.

v2.1

• The compiler reports an error if the name of a formal parameter is missing e.g:

  PROCEDURE P(CONST ARRAY OF INTEGER);

• Fixed an error which caused the compiler to crash if an incomplete type declaration was used: 

   VAR
     x: ARRAY;   

   PROCEDURE P(x: ARRAY);

• Fixed a compiler error register stack not empty which occurred when compiling LEN(buf.data) where buf is a global record of type Buffer:

  Buffer = RECORD 
    data: ARRAY 64 OF INTEGER 
  END;
  

• Fixed an error which caused the compiler to crash when compiling some illegal sets e.g.

   set := {0..254};