Design And Application Of The Universal Graphical Embedded Development Platform

Embedded development platform is of great importance for both embedded study and development. However, the diversity of MCU caused the diversity of embedded development platform. Even those designed by the same company are also different due to their corresponding series. As a result, people need to use different kinds of embedded development platform to study and develop. The purpose of this paper is to design a universal graphical embedded development platform to the diversity of MCU, and people can do graphical embedded developing with Freescale S08/S12/ColdFire Series MCUs through this platform.The universality is one of the difficulties of designing universal graphical embedded development platform. Different kinds of MCUs have different hardware parameters, drivers and development tools. To realize the universality of different platforms, we must ensure the graphical embedded development platform can be customized. The graphical embedded development platform can be customized to different MCUs just by reconfiguring the parameters. Dividing the embedded development platform to MCU dependence part and MCU independence part is not only the method to realize the customized feature, but also the innovation of the paper. The MCU dependence part mainly includes hardware driver library which made by all MCU hardware drivers, and MCU configuration database where store hardware parameter information and development tool information. To different kinds of MCUs, re-customize the hardware library and MCU configuration database can realize the universality of the platform.Graphical programming is another innovation of the customizable universal graphical embedded development platform. Replace the traditional text programming by graphical programming can not only improve programming efficiency but also reduce programming difficulty. In this paper, we use icon controls to package MCU hardware drivers and common features. Based on these icon controls, we design a graphical embedded development platform which implements writing, compiling and downloading functions of graphical program. At last, this paper will apply the graphical embedded development platform to Freescale S08/S12/ColdFire MCU, and use Freescale S12 series MCU MC9S12DG256 as the main control chip. We will finally complete a robot development platform which used for robot competition by this graphical embedded development platform.