IAR Systems has recently sponsored us with 10 licenses for their Embedded Workbench compiler and debugger toolsuite. Stanford Solar Car’s code team is now using industry-standard tools for developing our embedded code.
The code team has been impressed with IAR so far: it’s fast and easy to start using and provides some new and very powerful debugging tools.
Two of our new tools stand out as particularly useful:
- An integrated console window and printf support. As all programmers know, printf is one of the easiest and most lightweight debugging tools available. With IAR’s Embedded Workbench software printf calls in code are directed through the programmer and into a built-in console window.
- Debugging support for FreeRTOS, a real-time operating system that we are now using on our car. FreeRTOS provides multithreading and thread-safe queues, allowing us to more cleanly encapsulate code and integrate modules from one board into other boards on our car. The flipside of this new power is that debugging can become much more complicated. Fortunately for us, the Embedded Workbench for ARM simply monitors the state of running threads and queues and makes that information available in the debugging view.
We’re looking forward to using this new software as we carry out the code team’s mission of exploding all of the electrical team’s hardware using only software. We have a difficult task, but now we have the best tools to do it.
Thanks again, IAR!
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