Tiva Dev

A fully self-contained development environment for the Texas Instruments Tiva C Series Launchpads.

About

The TI TM4C was my introduction to embedded systems. It holds a very special place in my heart. One thing that I always disliked about developing for the TM4C board was having to use old and outdated IDEs. Thus, I wanted to make a modern development environment for the board.

Getting Started

Dependencies

• Docker
• Visual Studio Code
• Remote Extension Pack

Installing

You can simply clone the repo and reopen in the development container in Visual Studio Code.

Help

Debugging On macOS

On macOS you unfortunately cannot access USB devices from inside of Docker. You can still build the application in the Docker container but to debug on the TM4C you'll need to install OpenOCD and LM4Flash on macOS. The easiest way to do this is via HomeBrew. You can do so as follows.

1. Install OpenOCD

brew install openocd

2. Install LM4Tools

brew install lm4flash

3. Install GDB

brew install gdb

What I like to do then is keep two VS Code windows open. One is reopened in the Docker container and another one is open on the macOS host. When I'm ready to debug on macOS I run the flash.sh script and then launch the debugger in VS Code on the host window.

Another issue I had to resolve was that GDB complained that there was no file or directory for the executable's source file. A quick workaround for it was to enter directory /path/to/your/source/file once GDB starts. If you can find a fix for this please let me know! I used this blog post to get some ideas of how to fix it.

LibUSB Error

An issue I encountered on Ubuntu 20.04 was that I needed to run lm4flash and openocd as sudo. This is a problem when using VS Code extensions because you'd either have to hardcode your password into the JSON file or instead run lm4flash and openocd via the terminal (which I did not want to).

If you try to run lm4flash MicroInvaders.bin from {workspace}/build/src and get the following error:

Unable to open USB device: LIBUSB_ERROR_ACCESS
Unable to find any ICDI devices

Then this issue is for you. It just means your user account does not have the permissions to open the usb device. In this case the microcontroller we are trying to flash.

So to fix this we need to:

1. Create a new rules file as so:

sudo touch /etc/udev/rules.d/tm4c.rules

2. In the new tm4c.rules file paste

sudo vim /etc/udev/rules.d/tm4c.rules

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="1234", MODE="0666"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device", ATTRS{idVendor}=="1234", MODE="0666"

where you replace idVendor with the TM4C's vendor ID.

NOTE: If you don't know how to get the vendor ID for the Launchpad, simply run

echo 'ATTRS{idVendor}=="1cbe", ATTRS{idProduct}=="00fd", GROUP="users", MODE="0660"' | sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/99-stellaris-launchpad.rules

3. Now, once you have your new rules file setup, you need to reload the rules with

sudo udevadm control --reload-rules

4. Last but not least, unplug your Launchpad and plug it back in. You should now be able to run lm4flash MicroInvaders.bin