The UniCore-MX project aims to create an open-source firmware library for various ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers.
Currently (at least partly) supported microcontrollers:
The library is a fork of libopencm3. We highly value all the work done in libopencm3, but for our projects we need a higher commit rate than libopencm3 has at this point. We consider ourselves a friendly fork of libopencm3. We have different needs and wishes. These are in short:
Libopencm3 itself was written completely from scratch based on the vendor datasheets, programming manuals, and application notes. The code is meant to be used with a GCC toolchain for ARM (arm-elf or arm-none-eabi), flashing of the code to a microcontroller can be done using the OpenOCD ARM JTAG software.
In naming we will break compatibility with libopencm3 itself. While we feel it is a good choice to name subsytems according to the datasheet, this has caused the API to be incompatible across vendors. We wish it to be unified.
UniCore-MX is currently work in progress. Not all subsystems of the microcontrollers are supported, yet.
IMPORTANT: The API of the library is NOT yet considered stable! Please do not rely on it, yet! Changes to function names, macro names etc. can happen at any time without prior notice! We will shortly define our future API and work to achieve this as soon as possible.
TIP: Include this repository as a GIT submodule in your project. To make sure your users get the right version of the library to compile your project. For how that can be done refer to the unicore-mx-examples repository.
Building requires python. (Some code is generated)
For Linux:
For Windows:
Download and install:
Run msys shell and set the path without standard Windows paths, so Windows programs such as 'find' won't interfere:
export PATH="/c//Python27:/c/ARMToolchain/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin"
After that you can navigate to the folder where you've extracted libopencm3 and build it.
The most heavily tested toolchain is "gcc-arm-embedded" https://launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded
Other toolchains should work, but have not been nearly as well tested. Toolchains targeting linux, such as "gcc-arm-linux-gnu" or the like are not appropriate.
NOTE We recommend, that you use g-a-c version 2.8 2014q3 or newer to build all platforms covered by UniCore-MX successfully.
$ make
If your have an arm-elf toolchain (uncommon) you may want to override the toolchain prefix (arm-none-eabi is the default)
$ PREFIX=arm-elf make
For a more verbose build you can use
$ make V=1
The build may be fine-tuned with a limited number of parameters, by specifying them as environment variables, for example:
$ VARIABLE=value make
FP_FLAGS
- Control the floating-point ABI
If the Cortex-M core supports a hard float ABI, it will be compiled with
best floating-point support by default. In cases where this is not desired, the
behavior can be specified by setting FP_FLAGS
.
Currently, M4F cores default to -mfloat-abi=hard -mfpu=fpv4-sp-d16
,
M7 cores defaults to double precision -mfloat-abi=hard -mfpu=fpv5-d16
if available,
and single precision -mfloat-abi=hard -mfpu=fpv5-sp-d16
otherwise.
Other architectures use no FP flags, in otherwords, traditional softfp.
You may find which FP_FLAGS you can use in particular architecture in readme.txt shipped with gcc-arm-embedded package.
Examples:
$ FP_FLAGS="-mfloat-abi=soft" make # No hardfloat
$ FP_FLAGS="-mfloat-abi=hard -mfpu=magic" make # New FPU we don't know of
CFLAGS
- Add to or supersede compiler flags
If the library needs to be compiled with additional flags, they can be
passed to the build system via the environment variable CFLAGS
. The
contents of CFLAGS
will be placed after all flags defined by the build
system, giving the user a way to override any default if necessary.
Examples:
$ CFLAGS="-fshort-wchar" make # compile lib with 2 byte wide wchar_t
The libopencm3 community has written and is maintaining a huge collection of examples, displaying the capabilities and uses of the library. We have forked this repository as well, in order to maintain up-to-date examples for our diverging API. You can find all of them in the unicore-mx-examples repository (not up yet):
https://github.com/insane-adding-machines/unicore-mx-examples/
Simply pass -I and -L flags to your own project. See the unicore-mx-examples repository for an example of using this library as a git submodule, the most popular method of use.
It is strongly advised that you do not attempt to install this library to any
path inside your toolchain itself. While this means you don't have to include
any -I
or -L
flags in your projects, it is very easy to confuse a multilib
linker from picking the right versions of libraries. Common symptoms are
hardfaults caused by branches into arm code. You can use arm-none-eabi-objdump
to check for this in your final elf. You have been warned.
See HACKING.
The UniCore-MX code is released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), version 3 or later, as this is the license libopencm3 uses and our work is just a continuation of their efforts and codebase.
See COPYING.GPL3 and COPYING.LGPL3 for details.
For any questions or support, we kindly invite you to post to our mailinglists: