MicroMonitor:
An Embedded System Boot Platform
User manual
Current release
Available releases
uCon
MicroMonitor, or uMon, is an open-source embedded system boot platform. It is a mature, target-resident environment that provides the target system with a set of capabilities that enhance the development process and add to the flexibility of the deployed application. In its simplest form, it is a bootloader used to speed up the early stages of embedded system development by providing a target independent mechanism for program/data storage as well as industry standard communication interfaces for transfer of data to/from the target.
As a part of a development strategy for an organization, it provides a common base platform, an integral part of the application itself, providing the system with a core set of features that are generic in nature, and should be useable by application code regardless of the operating system chosen.
A fully enabled MicroMonitor platform includes:
- Extensible built-in flash file system (TFS)
- Support for JFFS2 and FAT
- TFTP client/server for network file transfer
- Xmodem for serial file transfer
- On-board ASCII file creation (i.e. target resident file editor)
- File-based scripts with conditional branching
- ASCII-script-driven startup options
- Command line history and editing
- UDP and RS232 based command line interaction
- Versatile configuration management using files
- Symbols and shell variables
- Symbolic display of variables, stack trace, runtime profiling and memory-based runtime trace
- Gdb server for application loads and post-mortem analysis
- Network host supporting ICMP and DHCP/BOOTP as a startup option
- Syslog client
- Zlib-based decompression
- Password-protected user levels
- Large API to hook the application to facilities provided by monitor
- Frame buffer interface, with variable sized fonts and bitmap
generation.
Here are a few examples that are simply running uMon scripts:
cogent_demo keypad_demo fbi_demo - Support for Multicast-DNS and IPV4-Local-Link Addressing
- Extensive documentation and application examples
- CPU ports: PowerPC, MIPS, ARM/Xscale, 68K/ColdFire, Blackfin, SH2, MicroBlaze, Nios
- OS boots: VxWorks, Linux, uC/OS-II, eCos, RTEMS, Nucleus, CMX, pSOS, etc...
uMon-M: Port to Cortex-M3/M4 boards.
This is a port of uMon to a (relatively)
small-memory-footprint system. It required several
adjustments to uMon standard; hence the need to create a separate uMon-M
(uMon for MCUs) tarball. As of this writing (Jan 2015), there are ports
for the following MCUs: LPC1768 (board=Simplecortex), STM32F4 (board=Discovery),
Kinetis-K60 (board=TWR-K60N512) and Kinetis-K64 (board=FRDM). I added a chapter to the end of the user manual documenting the changes made to fit this type of system and also wrote a short "getting started" guide for uMon-M on the K64F-FRDM board.
