arm7tdmi coding using C

i am new to coding arm7 using c...
what i have to study for coding .. do i need to study the assembly language and its architecture..
pls help me

one must know the arm instruction operations , to effectively code in c for arm processors.

without knowing the basic arm assembly, writng in c alone will not
help in developing serious projects.

srizbf said:

one must know the arm instruction operations , to effectively code in c for arm processors.

without knowing the basic arm assembly, writng in c alone will not
help in developing serious projects.

Click to expand...

Please allow me to challenge this statement. If you are good in "C", there is no real need to get into the ARM ASM to get a program up and running.
Just check out the examples provided by Keil and IAR or other vendors.

Bob

C is enough.
--
Amr

bobsanjose said:

Please allow me to challenge this statement. If you are good in "C", there is no real need to get into the ARM ASM to get a program up and running.
Just check out the examples provided by Keil and IAR or other vendors.

Bob

Click to expand...

I think without asm it very difficult to debug a program if it has any problem. But C programming is enough to become a good programmer for ARM, but asm knowledge will make you expert, when you can see inside of ARM. In C you cannot see registers and content, ASm is generated when you compile C prog, but to understand it you should know ASM programming. Knowing 8051 ASm instructions will in no way help in ARM as the instruction set is completely different because of architecture.

I recently taught myself embedded C programming for the ARM micro and I didn't need to learn the internal workings of the micro to program with it. The chip I was using (STM32) had many library files and examples which were a great help. The libraries do all the nuts and bolts stuff, while you can concentrate on your program logic.

Bob is correct in that you can learn a lot from these libraries, mainly on how the program functions (especially the peripherals) hang together on the chip, and if I have to do another project, I will probably dig a bit deeper into that side of things, as someone said, that will make you an expert.

I also went to some vendor training which was invaluable when I was starting out - you should be able to get on one of these from your disti..

hth
--dave

Hi dave ,
i agree with you, I dont tell C is not useful but from my 10 yrs exp in this field i have seen many people with 3 to 4 or 5 yrs experience, and also handle around 300 programmers under me, who are no doubt very good programmers by using internal libraries, they add header files given by vendor, but if request to change the startup code they fail to do it as per my requirement as it is written in asm and dont have architecture knowledge. Even at debugging stage, when things dont work as per the program they dont know to debug it at hardware or software level, they debug it at C program level and fail to bring any solution and i take 1/10th of the time that they take by debugging the problem at asm level, not from experience, but with asm knowledge. but u can still survive without knowledge of asm. i agree with you.
You can become a good software engineer with C programmer, but will become expert Embedded engineer with both hardware, software( asm and C).

yes, its always underestimated the importance of modifying code as opposed to making applications from scratch. I found that the Keil example applications for the STM32 were informative as they didn't use the ST libraries, we are sometimes spoilt with the ease of bolting together apps, but great for a mostly hardware engineer such as myself...

--dave