ARM Programming

Question

I am a high school student, who is experienced in Arduino and AVR Programming. Now I want to extend my abilities and go for ARM. Could anyone please suggest me a website or from where I can learn ARM Programming on my own. I don't care about the company of the ARM Processor. I just want to learn the programming, whether it is STM , Nuvaton, etc,etc. Please suggest something. It means a lot to me. Thank you.

mconners · Answer

You may want to check this course out edX Embedded Systems Course It's a good class, there are probably archived versions of an earlier class. Also, this book, http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~geobrown/book.pdf is an excellent resource. It uses the stm32 discovery boards, which are very affordable. and shows how to use gcc, gdb, etc from the command line. Mike

clem57 · Answer

I would start at a hardware level like ARM Assembly Language Programming . This should be followed with an IDE like Energia since it is very like Arduino except geared for ARM. Hope this helps. Of course others may have another approach.

Clem

balearicdynamics · Answer

Clem,

I agree with your syarting point. As you mention energia I think you are suggesting the msp boards and the entire TI echosystem. That is great for arm and also for the wide range of available boards at a very reasonablee price.

Bit if he will survive to the step of assembler (that today is more then possible), why nit moving to the TI IDE for C/C++ development on these platforms? It is more reliable and support better the TI arm boards lije the power control, high level debugger as parte of the MSP43x boards and so on...

Enrico

johnbeetem · Answer

Most ARM programmers program in C. The ARM machine language is designed to be compiled from C, and there's rarely a need to program in ASM since you can get at almost all machine features using C. However, if you're interested in broadening your programming knowledge, ASM can be exhilarating since you are programming at the bare metal and telling the CPU exactly what to do. It's like reading a foreign language work in its original form instead of someone else's translation. ASM can also be very frustrating, especially for a beginning. As I wrote in another thread: People sometimes refer to C as "programming without seatbelts". Well, ASM is "programming without seats, lights, brakes, tires, or a even a body". ARM ASM is not a simple assembly language. At one time ARM stood for Acorn RISC Machine, and later Advanced RISC Machine. Now ARM doesn't stand for anything. Each new architecture version added new instructions into the holes in the previous architectures, ending up with a "dog's breakfast" of an instruction set. One of the requirements of a RISC architecture is a few simple instruction formats. Well, the last ARM ARM (ARM Architecture Reference Manual) that had a table of instruction formats was ARMv5. ARMv7 has so many instruction formats (especially by adding Thumb2) that they've given up on having a consolidated instruction format table. So if you haven't programmed ASM before, I wouldn't recommend ARM as a starting point. FWIW, my favorites are PDP-11, 68000/Coldfire, and PowerPC. I haven't done any actual MSP430 programming, but the instruction set looks a lot like my beloved PDP-11. Here are a couple of discussions you might find interesting. This one at raspberrypi.org includes links to the ARM corporation site where you can download ARM ARMs. This one at element14 is an entertaining free-wheeling discussion of what's the best first programming language and includes some interesting discussion of ASM in general and includes my quote from above. Hope this helps!

ARM Programming

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