Overview

Name

eCos Support for the Stellaris EKK-LM3S811 Board -- Overview

Description

The Stellaris EKK-LM3S811 evaluation kit uses the Stellaris LM3S811 microcontroller from the 800 Series. The LM3S811 is an ARM cortex-M3 based microcontroller with 64KB of FLASH and 8KB of SRAM. The device has various peripherals such as UART, I2C, ADC or Analog Comparator. The kit features an OLED graphical display and UART0 is accessible via the on-board USB to UART converter.

Due to extreme limited RAM ressources (8KB SRAM only), the eCos port targets standalone ROM application using the eCos kernel in single user thread environment. The cortex-M architecture HAL requires a seperate stack to handle interrupts, thus the minimum kernel enable application requires 3 stacks. The interrupt stack, the Idle thread stack and the user stack. All stacks are set to the architecture minimum allowed size of CYGNUM_HAL_STACK_SIZE_MINIMUM ( 1360 bytes ).

Configuration

The minimum board configuration includes the Microcontroller HAL alongs with the ADC and I2C device drivers.

LM3S811 Microcontroller

CYGPKG_HAL_CORTEXM_LM3S8XX - The microcontroller configuration requirements are minimal. With the default setup, the microcontroller runs from the external clock source, a crystal of 6MHz. The chip internal PLL generates a fix 200MHz clock that is divided down to the default system clock frequency of 50MHz. In this scenario, the device uses full processing power. The system clock divider allows down scaling of the system clock frequency to reduce the overall power consumption of the device. The microcontroller also offers the option to run from an internal oscillator. This option has 2 modes, 3MHz or 12MHz. When selecting the internal oscillator, the PLL is bypassed. The system clock frequency becomes at best 12MHz if no further clock division is applied.

I2C Interface

CYGPKG_DEVS_I2C_CORTEXM_LM3S - The microcontroller uses the I2C bus to communicate with the SD1300 controller of the OLED 96 x 16 display. The SD1300 controller eCos driver is not currently available. The I2C is default set to use the low frequency mode ( 100KHz bus clock ). The high frequency mode ( 400 KHz ) is available by changing CYGNUM_HAL_CORTEXM_LM3S_I2C_CLK_SPEED.

ADC Interface

CYGPKG_DEVS_ADC_CORTEXM_LM3S - The LM3S811 includes 4 ADC channels including an optional internal temperature probe. There are many ways to use the on-chip ADC. The current eCos driver uses a single sequencer (sequencer 0) to schedule sampling of all channels. This practically means that all channels are sampled from the same trigger, a periodic timer interrupt in the current driver. The timer to use is selected from CYGNUM_DEVS_ADC_CORTEXM_LM3S_ADC0_SELECT_TIMER, with timer 0 as default value. The timer is used in 32 bits periodic mode, therefore cannot be re-used for any other user purpose. While the ADC has the possibility to trigger sampling on external IO events, the driver does not offer that flexibility. Finally, the driver only allows measurement of single-ended IOs.

Build ROM type applications

The steps needed to build the HAL library for the EKK-LM3S811 board are:

$ mkdir ek_lm3s811
$ cd ek_lm3s811
$ ecosconfig new ek-lm3s811 minimal
$ ecosconfig import $ECOS_REPOSITORY/hal/cortexm/lm3s/ek_lm3s811/current/misc/default_ROM.ecm
$ ecosconfig resolve
$ ecosconfig tree
$ make
    

At the end of the build the install/lib subdirectory should contain the library and linker script and the install/include subdirectory the necessary includes to compile the application.