The DB48X project can be built in two variants:
-
A simulator that uses Qt to approximately simulate the DM42 platform. There is no guarantee that the DMCP functions will behave as they do on the real thing, but it seems to be sufficient for software development. The benefit of using the simulator is that it facilitates debugging. The simulator also contains a test suite that can be invoked by running the simulator with the
-T
option. -
A firmware for the DM42, which is designed to run on top of SwissMicro's DMCP platform, and takes advantage of it.
Each variant can be built in debug
or release
mode.
The project has the following pre-requisites:
-
make
,bash
,dd
,sed
,tac
,printf
andfind
. -
Firmware builds require the
arm-none-eabi-gcc
GNU toolchain, which can be downloaded from the ARM site or installed directly on many platforms.-
Fedora:
dnf install arm-none-eabi-gcc arm-none-eabi-gcc-cs-c++ arm-none-eabi-newlib
-
MacOS:
brew install arm-none-eabi-gcc
-
-
Simulator builds require
g++
orclang
, as well as Qt6 (Qt5 is likely to work as well).-
Fedora:
dnf install qt-devel qt6-qtbase-devel qt6-qtdeclarative-devel
-
MacOS:
brew install qt
-
-
The FreeType development libraries (we use that to build the DM48 fonts)
-
Fedora:
dnf install freetype-devel
-
MacOS:
brew install freetype
-
-
The Intel® Decimal Floating-Point Math Library, which unfortunately does not appear to have any Intel-endorsed publicy available
git
repository. Pre-build libraries for the DM42, as well as for Mac / Apple Silicon and Linux / x86 are in this repository.
To build the simulator, simply use make
.
To build the firmware, use make fw
. If the build complains about the QSPI
contents having changed, something most likely went wrong.
Note: QSPI is an area of flash memory in the DM42 which is presenty used to store, among other things, some important numerical processing routines. In theory, the QSPI has additional space that could be used by your program, but the built-in QSPI loader in the DM42 only accepts QSPI contents that matches the default DM42 QSPI image. While it is possible to work around this, the project currently attempts to retain the original QSPI content to make it easier to install the program, and to ensure you can switch back and forth between DM42 stock firmware and DB48X.
There is a test suite integrated in the simulator. Run the simulator with the
-T
option to test changes before submitting patches or pull requests.
This code is a distance ancestor of SwissMicro's SDKDemo. The latest version of SDKdemo is available on SwissMicro's GitHub account.
The db48x.html help file can be copied to the DM42's /HELP
directory, although it is presently devoid of useful content. Ultimately, it is
likely that the DB48X's built-in help will use another help format that makes it
easier to have per-function on-line help.