Looking for functional STM32F7 LwIP + FreeRTOS example

[SHers]

I’m trying to bring up a simple application on a dual-core STM32H755 Nucleo board. Requirements are Ethernet (fixed IP address) and FreeRTOS, using the M7 core (the M4 core can thumb-twiddle, it’s not needed yet).

I have tried configuring a bare-minimum project with these parameters in fully-updated STM32CubeMX and opening it in STM32CubeIDE, but surprise! It won’t build. No custom code, just the ST-created framework.

First issue is that ethernetif.c’s low_level_init() function is trying to initialize a nonexistent TxConfig variable. (I commented that out.)

Second issue is that the linker now throws 97 errors, starting with many errors of the form “Unknown destination type (ARM/Thumb) in ...”, followed by a flock of “dangerous relocation: unsupported relocation” errors. 

It should NOT be this hard to get a dead-simple program skeleton for a bog-standard use case to build on a current ST dev board using ST tools. 

None of the example code I can find on the ST Web site addresses the dual-core H7 MCU and the LwIP/FreeRTOS combination. 

 Can anyone point me at a basic example for this combination that will build? 

[Pavel A.]

So do you have an F7 or H7? The ETH drivers and memory maps are different, please be certain.

Examples for H745 are here:  https://github.com/stm32-hotspot/STM32H7-LwIP-Examples -  should work for H755 as well.

 

 

 

[SHers]

It’s an H7, thanks. (That’s what makes it all so tricky; a dual-core project in the CubeIDE is very different from a single-core project, so I can’t just file the serial numbers off my F4 code and assume that it will build. 

Based on the 745/755 datasheet, I think a 745 project ought to transfer to the 755 if I change the processor setting. 

Thanks!

Steve

[MStackDev_376]

Hi,

 

May I ask if using lwIP is a requirement for your project?

 

If you are interested in a much simpler alternative, there is a solution that uses the Mongoose Networking library running on FreeRTOS on H755. The example is here, featuring a modern webserver with a dashboard. You can try and download it to your local workspace by going to the ‘Settings’ tab of the page, in the ‘Source Code Generator’ select the directory and then click the blue ‘Generate C/C++ Code’ in the upper right corner of the page to download. Open the project with CubeIDE, build it and run it.

 

This approach could save you quite a bit of time compared to configuring lwIP, which can sometimes require careful tuning of numerous settings to get everything working correctly. Mongoose has its own builtin network driver and its own builtin TCP/IP stack, avoiding lwIP. It also carries a much smaller memory footprint and with the well documented API you can implement most of the modern features of an embedded server (HTTP/HTTPS, MQTT, DNS, SNTP, etc.).

 

Alternatively, Mongoose can also be plugged with lwIP and offer you access to its application-level API. Let me know if you’d be interested in such an example.

 

Heads up, I’m part of the Mongoose development team, I hope this helps you with your project.

[SHers]

This looks interesting; I’ll check it out. Thanks!