[sdiy] Using Cortex Mx Arms in Synth DIY

[John Speth]

> > Yagarto is completely free. It is a community supported gcc for the
arm
> > and right now I believe it works under Windows, Linux and MacOS. It
can
> > be connected up to Eclipse and provides debugging. Don't really know
if
> > I would call this easy to use.
> >
> > Rowley CrossWorks is almost free ($150 for a personal license).
Again,
> > this is gcc, but comes with a set of much improved libraries and it
does
> > have a nice user interface (IDE). I have used Rowley to work with
Arms
> > in the past, however, I don't know if I would call it easy to use.
> 
> It's also possible to develop using a stripped-down command-line ARM
GCC
> toolchain + text editor + makefiles. If you don't care for top-heavy
GUI
> IDEs then this works very well.

That's a good exercise that I recently tried.  Lots of details to
consider though but there's plenty of info on the web when you get
stuck.  That's where the "free" tools don't seem so free, that is if you
haven't got the know-how or support to do it yourself.  That step will
set you up for using Eclipse (like Mentor's CodeSourcery Lite) as an IDE
which, again, requires a ton of setup steps.

Can anyone comment on the code output efficiency of the ARM GCC?  I've
used the IAR EWARM and it produces high quality and highly optimized
code.  Does ARM GCC come close to it (or better it)?  I haven't done a
side by side comparison.

JJS