Free visualisation tool for microcontroller customers

“The XMC family is a unique fit for applications such as motor control, power conversion, factory and building automation, renewable energy, transportation, LED lighting and home appliances,” said Maurizio Skerlj, Senior Director Industrial Microcontrollers at Infineon Technologies. “We enable convenient and time saving development using XMC devices. Strong tools such as Micrium’s µC/Probe are a natural fit for our XMC families of ARM-based microcontrollers. For visualising embedded systems, there are few tools on the market that are as powerful and easy to use.”

Micrium will offer Infineon a customised version of µC/Probe designed to run only on Infineon XMC microcontrollers. Further, Micrium worked with Infineon to define µC/Probe’s new oscilloscope feature that is capable of displaying the value of up to eight variables or I/O ports, even at the bit level.

“µC/Probe is a must-have tool for any embedded developer that needs to monitor and control the behaviour of their embedded system,” said Jean Labrosse, president and CEO of Micrium. “It supports the capabilities of Infineon’s XMC families and allows designers to gain insight into their embedded system that is not available using any other tool. Further, the new oscilloscope feature is ideally suited for monitoring and tuning motor control and power conversion applications.”

The new oscilloscope feature is especially useful because it allows monitoring of variables that would be extremely difficult to look at with a conventional oscilloscope. Since many of those variables are the result of internal computations, users would need to output these variables to digital to analogue converters and monitor those values with an actual (i.e. external) oscilloscope. With uC/Probe, users can monitor and change any variable without stopping the target. Other benefits include:

• Sampling can be synchronised to control loops or other internal time bases
• Capable of displaying up to eight analog or digital signals
• Trigger on any channel
• Provides pre- and post-triggering
• Auto-scale

µC/Probe offers kernel awareness (µC/OS-II and µC/OS-III), TCP/IP awareness (µC/TCP-IP), gauges, charts, an Excel spreadsheet interface, data logging, scripting and many additional useful features.