Programming TI Stellaris LaunchPad on GNU/Linux

TI Stellaris LaunchPad has a quite neat ARM Cortex-M4F based microcontroller and built in ICDI debugging interface. It is a great tool for learning ARM architecture for a small price as $12.99 including FedEX shipping. Now this is upgraded to a better board called TI Tiva C launchpad which has a similar microcontroller. You can see an unboxing video of this launchpad from my friend's site.

Here I'm telling you my experience with this launchpad in GNU/Linux. I'm using Fedora based Fuduntu Linux 2013.1 64bit for this. It is a quite fast and simple linux distribution and it is worth while to try. 

First of all I checked about the device drivers availability for this. I'm using Linux kernel 3.5.8 and it got auto detected without any manual driver installation. Here you can see the output of "lsusb" command.

After some research I found out a great post on Stellaris LaunchPad linux support.

According to that I downloaded the LM4FLASH software source and compiled it. Please note that you need to have LIBUSB-DEV dependency to compile this. You can install it by " yum install libusb* " command. In a debian based distro like ubuntu,you may use apt-get instead of yum package manager. Following commands can be used for the whole process according to that post.

git clone https://github.com/utzig/lm4tools.git
cd lm4tools/lm4flash/
make
sudo cp lm4flash /usr/bin/

After that I programmed the "qs-rgb" example from StellarisWare (now TivaWare) to test it.

You can get the TivaWare software library for TI Tiva C series microcontrollers from here.

The flashing was a success and the colour changing of RGB led on the launchpad was working (as for qs-rgb example),