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  • Author Author: Jan Cumps
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ImageCraft JumpStart Microbox Education Kit - Part 1: Preview

Jan Cumps

The ImageCraft JumpStart Microbox Education Kit is a set of hardware and software tools to teach C and Cortex-M embedded programming.

In essence, it's an Arduino compatible shield, an STMicro Nucleo dev board, a C book, an IDE, a compiler and libraries.

 

In this blog series I'm trying to find out if it's more then just an existing 3rd party dev board paired with a shield. And if (and how) this kit can turn you into an embedded programmer.

 

This video is unavailable.

 

In part 1, I'm checking the out-of-box experience. Is it easy to get the boards and tool chain running?

Spoiler Alert: it's easy

 

Getting Started Fast

 

We all know what it's like to unpack a new development board, and then struggle for hours, days, weeks (hello, sama5d4, I'm looking at you).

That's not the case with this board. The Quick Start Guide walks you through software and hardware setup. Step by step, as it should be.

 

When completed, you have the drivers installed, the IDE up and running and the tool chain configured.

Compiling and running the first example works straight away. The OLED display was showing 'Hello World' without any issue. Perfect experience.

I tested 6 of the examples, and they all work flawlessly. The build cycle is fast.

 

The only thing I struggled with a little (and the quickstart guide warns you for that) is mounting the shield on the ST Nucleo board. The shield uses stacking headers, with springy sharp pins.

It's a bit tough to properly align the shield with the dev board.

With proper care, this works, though.

 

 

image

 

 

Food for thought

I don't know at this moment,after doing the quickstart, what the competitive advantage of this kit is going to be.

It's running on multiple legs. It tries to learn standard C, and also embedded C for a particular controller family.

The IDE is not one you'd usually see in your common professional environment.

it comes with an own compiler and abstraction libraries - is that going to be useful for a future firmware developer? Would a professional company choose this combination as its strategic firmware development base?

Is there an educational advantage in supporting an in-house compiler?

Why does one spend effort in designing and maintaining bespoke libraries and tool chains if the goal is education? Is there a part of ImageCraft's business model that I don't understand yet?

I don't have the answers to those questions yet. But if the training track is as smooth as the out-of-box experience, I have high hopes.

 

Hang on for part 2...

 

Related posts
ImageCraft JumpStart Microbox Education Kit - Part 1: Preview
ImageCraft JumpStart Microbox Education Kit - Part 2: Stepping Through an Example - what do I learn?
ImageCraft JumpStart Microbox Education Kit - Part 3a: The Education Shield - LED matrix and I/O expander
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  • Hi Jan,

     

    It will be great to hear what you make of it. All too often some of the technical benefits get lost in the product website / datasheet.

     

    I found the comparison with GCC on the website rather odd for example - usually people list the major benefits first!, but it looked back-to-front. To me the

    major benefit is the direct support, and the next benefit looks like ease of use (possibly) from the comments to this post so far.

    To me it looks like the other comparison items here are minor differentiators at best - personal opinion:

    image

    Not stating it is a bad product, it could be great - but from a read of that list, I wouldn't find it appealing. They need to re-do that list - surely it can be improved into a better comparison if this compiler is so good.

     

    The first comparison item states that it is Non-GCC - is that an advantage or a disadvantage? GCC is one of the success stories of open source and has massive market share - would be interesting to see a figure.

    The second two items seem so irrelevant it borders on the bizarre to include them. Usually people only modify a file at a time; it doesn't take a significant time to compile a single file to the extent that it would be a major product differentiator surely? I wonder if they meant the entire build process. But the usual answer is to throw CPU power at your build server.

    On a microcontroller if you're having to frequently rebuild the entire code or even a single file repeatedly, then something is not right in the user's software design process.

     

    The 'Select devices by name' may be a ST-specific-toolchain issue? I've not seen that with Code Composer Studio for Cortex-M development for TI devices. There you can select by part name.

    The state-of-the-art debugger sounds interesting - the free debugger is GDB of course, and has a learning curve but is extremely powerful. And whatever you learn with GDB can be re-used from microcontroller

    programs all the way to massive applications running on Linux on (say) Cortex-A or Intel CPUs.

    I've not used J-Link with Code Composer, but J-Link was seamless with Cortex-M with Infineon's IDE. And in general the experience is similar to Code Composer since it is based on Eclipse.

    MISRA checks are available in GCC too. I don't know what "CRC generation and other production featues" means - there is the free Linux cksum command that can be used for CRC computation.

    The direct support is great, but if there is a comparison then it is fair to state that TI, Infineon and others have very active forums which are a good option for non-commercial user (which is what the

    JumpStart Educational Kit is for).

  • in reply to shabaz

    Dear shabaz: very odd, you must be looking at a cached version of our old webpage. Our new site is http://c4everyone.com and all the affected pages at http://imagecraft.com should have proper re-direct. Please check out our new pages.

     

    I have answers to all your questions of course, but check out the new pages and I will comment back after.

     

    Thanks for checking us out.

  • in reply to richardman

    Hi Richard,

     

    I'll check out the latest site, just fyi the URL I'm using is in the screenshot below (the page has a 17th Sep date), and I did Ctrl-F5 to force a reload, this URL may need redirecting if this information is not current,

    image

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