Hi List,

has anyone of you had the chance to try this Pascal compiler for embedded platforms?

http://www.mikroe.com/mikropascal/

Any comment will be appreciated!

Roberto

Yes,

good product and good company.
I visited the company at embedded world fair in Nürnberg, Germany and was impressed of them.

http://www.embedded-world.de

They improve their products and they have 16 (or 60) employees one man told me at the fair.

On W98 were problems with the software, so I was sceptical but on XP the Pascal compiler runs good. You can try the demo version with 4k code.

I work with it now. Interrupts can be programmed.

There are little things that are for me not 100% understandeable such as if you put space inbetween numbers (and names) that the compiler will recognise this as if there were no spaces inbetween... But there are other positive things. Good libraries. Intuitive and userfriendly behaviour once you get used to it.

In the past I programmed in pure assembler, but now I migrated a project which needed some weeks or months almost in some days to pascal.

Important for me was that the software does not need internet access, because I only want to go online with Linux.

They told me that they will cooperate with a big german distributor (Conrad Electronic).

best regards, Rainer

Thanks a lot for your comments, very interesting indeed. Can you make a comparison against FPC target-embedded ?

I routinely write in C for the microcontrollers I use, but now with ARM Cortex M3 I could try Pascal.
I'm just a little afraid of the potentially limited maturity of these.

Thanks!

Roberto

2013/3/15 Rainer Stratmann

I also like their products, especially the development boards are very well designed. The IDE+debugger is nice & complete and the support fo the software is also very good.

The things I do not like are that you have to buy a license for each compiler family (PIC, PIC16, PIC 32, ARM), the compiler parser sometimes is a little odd and, most important for me, they do not support objects and have no plans to do so.

When you can live without objects a good choice, when you need objects then freepascal is your choice.

Michael

Roberto P. wrote

Thanks a lot for your comments, very interesting indeed. Can you make a comparison against FPC target-embedded ?

FPC target-embedded is very complicated to install (Linux development computer).

I routinely write in C for the microcontrollers I use, but now with ARM Cortex M3 I could try Pascal.

For 32 bit ARM I would try to use freepascal.
I got it work somehow.

I'm just a little afraid of the potentially limited maturity of these.

What do you mean exactly with that?

Thanks! Roberto

Michael Ring wrote

I also like their products, especially the development boards are very well designed. The IDE+debugger is nice & complete and the support fo the software is also very good.

Yes, they are busy with that stuff. And have a relatively good marketing (important to earn money).

The things I do not like are that you have to buy a license for each compiler family (PIC, PIC16, PIC 32, ARM),

...

the compiler parser sometimes is a little odd

yes

and, most important for me, they do not support objects and have no plans to do so.

But for little projects (AVR 8 bit controllers) this is the best choice.

When you can live without objects a good choice, when you need objects then freepascal is your choice.

In general for 32 bit ARM I would choose freepascal.

Michael

2013/3/15 Rainer Stratmann

> Can you make a comparison against FPC target-embedded ? FPC target-embedded is very complicated to install (Linux development computer).

I'm on Win32 (or Win32 on Parallels on Max OS X); I'll have to dig more to understand what is needed.

For 32 bit ARM I would try to use freepascal. I got it work somehow.

any tip or guide would be appreciated, then.

> I'm just a little afraid of the potentially limited maturity of these. What do you mean exactly with that?

I mean that (maybe) both FPC and mikroePascal are young products for the embedded world, so that I might be facing compiler or library propblems during the devlopment, besides my own project problems.

That's a +1

Roberto

Lazarus & Freepascal work fine & native on both windows / mac, with retina display lazarus actually looks very good when you use a current snapshot.

mikropascal is windows only, when you only plan to use ARM then programming also works fine in a Parallels VM, when you plan to also target PIC/PIC32 you need a real windows computer because their pic-programmer does not work correctly atm in a Parallels VM.

Michael

For me that is not easy. Most of the time I get it work somehow and shortly after I did not realize why ... :-)
I have suggestions to make something easier, but I am always facing excuses why it is good as it is, so I less take part of this type of discussions which are exhausting for me.

May be mikroe is not providing the sourcecode (I am not sure), but they have for nearly everything a solution. Ethernet, FAT, SPI, SD-Card, USB, HTTP, TCP, etc...
There were problems in the past, but because they are (heavily) busy with that stuff they solve most of the important problems. And I think they are honest.

I've tried to use mikropascal and not had any luck , i emailed them my board i was going to use with the product and they said they didnt support it.

I've now got a ST Link V2 for the debugging , if someone could give me an idea how to set it up , i would be great full.

Kind Regards

Justin Smyth

What kind of controller?
Atmel AVR 8 bit?
ARM 32 bit?

For AVR it works good.

Justin Smyth wrote

I've tried to use mikropascal and not had any luck , i emailed them my board i was going to use with the product and they said they didnt support it.

may be in the future...

Arm cortex m3 lpc 1343
32 bit
Board from wave share

I'm using a LPC 1343 Microcontroller unit from waveshare, basically its a Cortex M3.

the link for the board is -
http://www.wvshare.com/product/Open1343-Package-A.htm

I've now got STLInk V2 debugging kit , i want to debug this board in lazarus

KInd Regards

Justin

May be you can use STM32F...

That works for me with FPC.
http://j-software.dk/stm32f103.php

I've had a quick read of http://j-software.dk/stm32f103.php , for the fpc part i kinda get what to do ,

i want to be able to debug code on the fly as in when its running on my board using the STLINK V2... so i assume i would have to setup lazarus gdb to do this , is this correct ? if so how.

Those two links may help:

The first article references the 2nd:

http://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/help-on-arm-cortex-m3-development-tools-ide/20/?wap2

https://github.com/mossmann/hackrf/wiki/LPC43xx-Debugging

Michael

I have downloaded openocd and will install it and setup the gdb side of it.

Not sure when could be today or tomorrow

Rainer what board were using using for this below ?

I had my own (simple) board Jeppe gave me an upload program written by his own which works perfect.
May be you can ask him. He is the specialist for that stuff.

Does that allow debugging via Lazarus ?

I am not sure, but I think that is not possibe.
For me I don't need debugger.

Justin Smyth wrote

Does that allow debugging via Lazarus ?

Currently I use MSEide in order to develop a M3 based based project (Energy Micro Tiny Gecko). Although with gcc but FPC could be used too I assume. Debugging connection is a Segger J-Link provided by the EFM32-TG-STK3300 starter kit, works very well.

Martin

Thanks, i am waiting to hear back regarding some suggest changes that were suggest in the debugging section that Michael Ring was working on a while ago, i want to write some code in lazarus for my ARM Cortex M3 and debug it in lazarus ( via gdb using gdb from openOCD) so i can see whats going on , just as a start because its going to take me a while to get my application running etc.

Justin

Just in case you don't know, MSEide+MSEgui is an alternative to Lazarus especially made with development of embedded projects in mind: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mseide-msegui/

Martin

Hi,

http://www.astrobe.com/default.htm

Oberon on ARM.

I think its worth to try it!

Markus Greim

Hmmm.... I read through the web-page, one thing I could not find is support for real debugging (singlestepping, show registers) in ide, they only seem to provide log message capture.

Without a real debugger it is for me not worth the download. I might of course be wrong, did you already test it and does it provide real debugging?

Michael