Any interest in building open framework for printf, filesystem, et al ?

pandoraems · ‎2009-01-04

Posted on January 05, 2009 at 05:20

pandoraems · ‎2011-05-17

Posted on May 17, 2011 at 12:57

Hi all

I am making some progress in building up a gcc based framework for having such things as printf/scanf working over serial, as well as sprintf/sscanf and last but not least - fscanf/fprinf implementation using ChaN's tiny fat system implementation.

Lanchon's linker scripts and project framework along with CS toolchain have been of great help!

There is no doubt that it would be great to have such framework for having these powerful functions in our stm32 firmware arsenal, so I propose we put our hands/brains together and come up with such framework, which would be easy to use for beginners (or people who just don't want to get into nasty gcc/newlib details) and reliable.

I wouldn't mind setting up a git repo to host this effort if there is interest.

From looks of it, there is a lot of work needs to be done however to iron out all the gotchas, and i am still a newbie at embedded programming, so I would need help from capable people of this community to achieve good results for this framework.

I am currently working with 128k/20k stm32 and everything seems to fit dandy in these limited resources.

I'd also like to mention that i'd want this effort to be licensed under BSD, MIT or other commercially permissive license. Reason is I am planning to use this for commercial products, which would potentially contain closed IP.

This would also be great for people wishing to use this commercially and therefore the incentive to contribute the open parts of their modifications and improvements to the common repo.

My other motivation is that this framework would make it easier to port eLua onto the stm32 platform to allow making our firmware scriptable.

Let me know what you guys think

Cheers

relaxe · ‎2011-05-17

Posted on May 17, 2011 at 12:57

I totally agree with that, But I have to rant first:

================================

I think the STM32 application team did a =wonderful= job at making those examples for the firmware lib. I just think it's sad that they stopped at the very basic level... I2C example: The lib contains every function required to actually communicate, but lacks a simple ''Transmit X number of bytes to adress Y, returns OK or FAIL'' kind of functions.

The SDIO/SDCard example on the high density device is extremelly complete, with support for all SD/SDHC cards out there (even 2GB and 4GB non-SDHC!!), but lacks any king of file system implementations.

I really think ST should/could do such an ''app framework'' over their Firmware Library, so we can really ''Release our Imgaination''.

================================

Ok, for the printf / scanf, and the FileSystem (over SDIO or SPI): just search the forum for ''sdio'', you will find a topic named ''sdio + fat16/32''. In there, I posted a working SDIO+Fat16/32 With printf/scanf over serial port.

Somebody posted a working Filesystem over SPI too.

With all that, you should have a solid starting base.

Have fun!

-Relaxe

[ This message was edited by: relaxe on 30-12-2008 14:42 ]

mcatudal · ‎2011-05-17

Posted on May 17, 2011 at 12:57

pandoraems,

Let me know how I can help you, we may be able to share ideas as I am planning on doing something that way. I do plan to add some special CAN software as well. We can discuss details in private.

You can find my address on my website

http://home.comcast.net/~mcatudal/

Michel

slawcus · ‎2011-05-17

Posted on May 17, 2011 at 12:57

And for the filesystem it would be nice to have something that will support NAND memory. Wear leveling is mandatory.