Getting started

Welcome to WhateverDSP (wdsp for short)!

This guide aims to give a beginner-level introduction to setting up your project. It is a work-in-progress and help is appreciated!

Requirements

This introduction assumes:

• You will be programming in C. You don't have to know much of it to get started.
• You are running Linux or Mac OS (Mojave and up has been tested).
• You have downloaded and set up Visual Studio Code.

Visual Studio Code extensions

The following extensions are necessary for you to use VS Code effectively:

• C/C++
• Cortex-debug

Toolchain installation

On Linux

You will need the following packages installed:

• arm-none-eabi-gcc GCC toolchain
• arm-none-eabi-newlib C library
• arm-none-eabi-gdb and openocd for use with

Optionally, if you want to flash the board using DFU:

• dfu-util

On Mac OS

You can use brew to install the necessary dependencies:

brew install gcc-arm-embedded gdb openocd

Optionally, if you want to flash the board using DFU:

brew install dfu-util

Downloading WhateverDSP

After you have your toolchain set up, you can download WhateverDSP. You can:

• Download the repository as a ZIP file and include it as a subfolder in your project folder (or elsewhere on your disk), or
• Include this library into your project as a git submodule.

Once you have WhateverDSP on your disk, you need to create a Makefile in your project folder. A minimal setup follows:

# Makefile

# Your project name
TARGET = example

# Target board- at the moment there is just the one
BOARD = wdsp-dev

# Point this whereever you cloned WhateverDSP
include WhateverDSP/libwdsp.mk

You can then run:

make init

to initialise a default project. It will:

• Create a config.ini
• Create your main target file (in this case example.c).
• Run make vscode if there is no .vscode folder.

Open the target file (example.c) to get started!

Compiling

Compiling inside VS Code

To start running and debugging your project, first invoke:

make vscode

This sets up a workspace with all required settings to get you started with development and debugging in VSCode.

Connect your STLinkV3-Mini debugger to your computer and plug in the cable to the debug header on the dev board (just under the DC power jack). You can now hit F5 to run the project and start debugging directly on the hardware!

Enabling system load graphs

If you want to show CPU usage graphs while debugging, uncomment the "System Load" section inside .vscode/launch.json.

Compiling on the command line

In the example Makefile configuration, WhateverDSP would automatically compile the example.c into a ready to flash binary once you invoke make. For more complex projects you can specify your own dependencies like usual.

Flashing via DFU-util

If you have dfu-util installed the resulting binary can be flashed onto the board by connecting it to your computer via USB, holding down the "Boot" button while plugging the 9V DC power in, and running make dfu.