What's New in Armaide v2

Version 2.4.1 © 2006-2010 CFB Software
Last Updated 13 Apr 2010

Options

• Central Europe
• Cyrillic
• Western
• Greek
• Turkish
• Hebrew
• Arabic
• Baltic

The default character set used is Western i.e. CodePage 1252, Latin-1.

IMPORT search depth

The IMPORT search depth setting accessed from Tools > Options > Compiler / Linker allows you to specify how many levels of folders should be searched by the compiler or linker when searching for imported modules. The default value is 4, the minimum is 1 and the maximum is 9.

Examples

There are two sets of examples: General and board-specific.

• The general examples should work with little or no modification on any of the supported LPC2xxx targets
• The board-specific examples are separated into folders identifying which supported boards they have been tested on. It is likely that they would need to be modified to run on a different development board even if the target processor is the same. 

For descriptions of the examples refer to the ReadMe file in the Documents\Armaide\Examples folder 

NOTE: Some of the examples use library modules or language features that are not included in the Evaluation Edition. The source code can be studied but the examples cannot be compiled and / or linked in the Evaluation Edition.

Library Modules

Full details of the Library Modules can be found in the Library Definitions section in the Linking and Loading chapter of the document Oberon for LPC2000 Microcontrollers accessible from the Armaide Help menu.

All Editions

• LPC.Mod includes additional LPC2000 family common constant definitions e.g. Timer1.
• Module Traps 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.
• Library modules needed by the runtime system are included.

Standard and Professional Editions only

Additional library modules included are IAP, LPC2103, LPC2106, LPC2148, LPC2378, Strings, Math, Random, and ResData.

• Modules LPC2xxx include peripheral register definitions specific to that family of microcontrollers.
• Module IAP allows full access to the In-Application (IAP) programming functions of the target processor (details below).
• Module ResData contains functions to access the constant resource data from the Oberon-07 program (details below).

Professional Edition only

• Source code of all library modules (except the compiler-dependent MAU and FPU) is included.    

In-Application (IAP) Programming Module

The IAP library module allows full access to the In-Application (IAP) programming functions of the target processor. These allow the reading and writing of the on-chip flash memory as well as obtaining the part identification number and boot code version number. The IAP module uses 128 bytes of RAM at the top of memory. This is declared in module LPC (the first module with global variables to be loaded) to prevent global variables in your program from being overwritten.

Each function and its parameters has a direct correspondence to one of the IAP commands. Refer to the chapter titled Flash memory system and programming in the NXP target processor User Manual (UM10xxx) for details of their use.

Resource Data

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.

Linker

• A file <modulename>.ref containing the names and absolute addresses of each module is created at link time and appended to the executable as resource data. It is used by the runtime trap reporting system to display the name of the module that was executing when the trap occurred.
• The link map includes details of the linked resources.
• 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.

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.

Supported Targets

The target processors supported by Armaide are:

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

Technical Support

• Armaide Technical Support is available for Evaluation Edition users.

Documentation

• A chapter Programming Conventions and Guidelines is included in the document Oberon for LPC2000 Microcontrollers.
• Page numbers are included in the Table of Contents
• Each numbered section can be accessed directly using Acrobat bookmarks.

Problems fixed

v2.4.1

• Runtime error trapping now identifies the correct module name instead of the one following it.
• Report an error when compiling a procedure which contains strings with a total of more than 1024 characters instead of crashing.
• A nested procedure inside an interrupt procedure no longer causes the interrupt procedure to hang.
• Processing of negative numbers in FPU has been modified in an attempt to avoid a suspected side effect which results in a infinite loop in a subsequent MOD expression.   
• Fixed erroneous RETURN values when constants > 256 or < 0 are used in IF statements in leaf procedures. e.g.

PROCEDURE* P1 (CONST x: BOOLEAN): INTEGER;
  VAR result: INTEGER;
BEGIN
  IF x THEN result := 0 ELSE result := 257 END;
  RETURN result
END P1;


v2.4

• Out explicitly imports Serial and the Main library module and its imports are linked before the main module of the application. This ensures that the Out module is correctly initialised with a PutCh procedure before it is used by the initialisation section of any other module.   

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};