Erika Enterprise and RT-Druid for dsPIC (R) DSC: support for Microchip dsPIC (R) DSC

Embedded microcontroller units are spreading in thousands of applications, ranging from single to distributed systems, control applications, multimedia, communication, medical applications and many others. Modern microcontrollers, which are growing in computational power, speed and interfacing capabilities, are more and more feeling the need of tools to make the development of complex scalable applications easier.

The dsPIC (R) DSC family represents the latest product of Microchip Technology Inc., the world leading company in the field of microcontroller units. With a speed of up to 40 MHz, the dsPIC (R) DSC family seamlessly integrates a DSP core for high performance computation with a full range of interfaces to several buses like CAN, I2C, SPI, serial lines, ecc.

Erika Enterprise has been designed to be compiled using the GNU gcc toolchain. The dsPIC (R) DSC porting of Erika Enterprise in particular can be compiled using the GNU tools for dsPIC (R) DSC provided by Microchip. The porting provides both the binutils package and the gcc package, plus a set of proprietary libraries from Microchip which can be used to control the various peripherals provided by the dsPIC (R) DSC microcontrollers. The following list describes the various packages which contains the various parts of the compilation toolchain:

The GNU assembler and binutils
This package is distributed inside the MPLAB IDE from Microchip.

The GNU GCC from Microchip
The compiler is packaged in a separate product, called The Microchip C30 Compiler, which is available as a product under the Microchip website. A free version is also available for students and universities. The source code of the compiler is also available under the GPL license on the Microchip web site.

The GNU GCC recompiled from Microchip sources
In addition to theMicrochip C30 Compiler, Evidence also offer a free version of the GCC toolchain for dsPIC (R) DSC compiled from the sources made available under the GPL license on the Microchip web site. This version can be used to compile Erika Enterprise and Erika Enterprise Basic without additional packages other than MPLAB IDE.

C Libraries
A set of libraries which can be used to control the peripherals implemented on the particular Microchip chip in use. These libraries are packaged together with the Microchip C30 Compiler. To compile an Erika Enterprise or and Erika Enterprise Basic application, the development environment needs to be configured to correctly recognize the Microchip C30 compiler and the MPLAB ASM30 assembler programs. For doing so, please go to the “Preference” menu and find the “RT-Druid/Oil/PIC30 Configurator” form. The first textbox, labeled Gcc path, refers tothe installation directory of the Microchip C30 compiler. The second textbox, labeledAsm path, refers to the installation directory of the ASM30 assembler provided with the MPLAB IDE.

Use EE gcc to resolve dependencies
When checked, the C30 compiler recompiled by Evidence from the Microchip sources will be used instead of the installed C30 compiler to compute the dependencies of the .C and .S files, and to perform the C preprocessing of the .S files. This feature is useful to avoid compilation problems when the system has a Student Edition of the C30 compiler with an expired license. In that case, the compiler puts a message on the standrd output, corrupting the dependencies and preprocessing outputs.

Use EE gcc to compile
When checked, the C30 compiler recompiled by Evidence from the Microchip sources will be used instead of the C30 compiler to compile the .C files. Please note that the original Microchip Libraries will be linked also in this case.