Armaide

An Integrated Development Environment for
LPC2000 ARM-based Microcontrollers

What is Armaide?

Armaide is a fast and responsive integrated development environment for Windows. It is used to write software to run on the powerful NXP / Philips LPC2000 family of ARM-based microcontrollers.  The programming language supported by Armaide is Oberon-07. 

Oberon-07 Code in Action

A simple digital clock application running on a LPC2148 development board with no operating system or external RAM. The total size of the compiled code including the startup, configuration and LCD driver software is 2Kb.

The Oberon-07 Language

Oberon is a general-purpose, procedural programming language. Its type-safety and module consistency-checking features facilitate the development of secure and reliable software. Oberon is a refinement of Modula-2 which, in turn, was an improved version of Pascal. Programmers with experience of either of these languages should adapt to Oberon with minimal effort. In additional to the regular range of programming language facilities Oberon-07 features include:

• Type-extension capabilities
• Assertions
• Automatic array index checking
• Type-checking across modules
• Read-only access to external variables
• Optional read-only access to parameters
• Nested procedures
• Nested comments

The implementation of Oberon-07 which targets the ARM-based microcontrollers includes additional features particularly designed for efficient code-generation, low-level programming and access to all capabilities of the devices: 

• Generation of regular ARM native code
• Direct access to memory-mapped peripheral devices
• Interrupt procedures
• Direct access to the program counter, frame pointer, link register and other special ARM registers
• Leaf procedures store parameters and local variables in registers when execution speed is a priority

The library modules and linker included with Armaide support the LPC210x, LPC214x and LPC2214 family of microcontrollers from NXP (Philips).

Armaide Features

Editing

• Standard Windows, programmer-oriented, text-editing features
• Fast and responsive interactive operation
• Tabbed multi-document interface for editing multiple source files
• Split-screen editing
• Regular expression support in Find / Replace
• Bookmarks
• Line modification indicators
• Optional line numbers, printing features etc. etc.

Language Syntax-oriented Editing 

• Automatic syntax colouring of Oberon language elements as you type 
• Auto-indexing of procedures and imports of each source file for code navigation
• Auto-capitalisation of Oberon keywords when typing source code

Development

• Control Editing, Compiling, and Linking generation cycle from the menu
• Capture compilation errors in a separate window
• Click on an error line to take you to the actual line in the source
• Automatic linking without the need for complicated make files, command line parameters etc. etc. 
• Generates standard HEX files ready to upload to the target ARM microcrontroller

Availability

A pre-release version of Armaide is scheduled for Q4 2008. Join the Armaide User Group for the latest news on features and availability, access to the pre-release version, special introductory pricing offers and answers to any questions you may have.

System Requirements

To use Armaide you will need to have the the Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0 (or later) Redistributable Package installed on your computer.

If you do not already have it, it can be downloaded from Microsoft's website:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa731542.aspx

If this URL has been superseded try the more general download link:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/