Harmony or Kaos

 

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Short missive on the framework Microchip calls Harmony 3.  Not sure if this is Harmony or is it a cruel replay of KAOS from Get Smart.

While Harmony 2 for PIC32 was tolerable, this new version is lacking.  I have read several forum entries where "experts" are expressing concerns that it may or may not work. And if it works today, no guarantee it will work tomorrow.  The "code suppositories" are just that.  Anyway I need to move to the next version of XC32, but that would require completely replacing about half of the Harmony 2 libraries and that was a non starter.  So a few days ago I started to build a simple project, USB HID and a console port.  Two basic things I need.

Now I admit I rarely used the code configurator for PIC18 projects. So using this for Harmony was a different thing.  Harmony 2 was mostly a text based configurator, except  for the clock and pins.  The documentation of Harmony 3 is mostly for previous revisions and implementations.  Instructional videos from Microchip do not match with using MPLAB 6.25.  The content creator is needed to download what you need for the framework.  Well the latest content is incompatible with the PIC32MX270 and it's components, at least that is the message I kept getting.  That was a day just trying to figure out how that worked.  Then there is a Project Graph where you have to connect the components.  I was an avid user of Borland's Object Vision in 90s, so graphical construction is not new to me.  But this was not intuitive.  When I finally got all the wires drawn on the GUI configuration, it failed to generate all the .h files and thus would not compile.  The first thing I figured out was I did not need the FreeRTOS component.  One thread in the project, no need for an RTOS, but I have to keep deleting it, since the configurator thinks I need/want it. 

I finally stripped the project down to just a console and then all the .h files were generated.  It appears once you get them generated, then the configurator will continue to update them,.  The trick is to get them generated.  Then I added the USB back in, generated the files and it still compiled.  A few more tweaks and the USB HID registered with the laptop and the console port started displaying messages.  So I have a basic system running.

But there is more fun ahead.  They have changed all the names of the common .h and .c files to something else as well as restructured them.  A lot of the common calls/types/functions have changed names.  It appears that many components that used drivers, no longer use them.  So the SysObj model for projects has changed.  When they said there was no compatibility between v2 and v3,  they meant none.  

One final hurdle.  The debugger will not load with MPLAB 6.25 and XC32 v4.40.  The message was 

 [ BootFlash ] at 0x1fc00490, expected 0x409bf800, got 0x00000000.
Could not enter debug mode because programming the debug information failed. Invalid combinations of config bits may cause this problem

which looks like a failure to load the Boot Loader memory, which I believe is where the debug module resides.  The config bits were the ones I have been using for a long time with this PIC32.  I thought this had something to do with the linker or the compiler version.  So I told the configurator not to generate a linker file.  That worked once.  I admit I did not go through this methodically, but in the end it looks like MPLAB 6.25 is the problem.  MPLAB 6.10 works every time, regardless of XC32 version.  I am still not generating a linker file so it using the default linker configuration.  

Not sure what lies ahead, but I am sure it will be challenging and frustrating.