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Free H8 development environment under Linux
Chapter 1 Introduction


1.1 Why H8?

Many one-chip microcontrollers are now easily obtained by electronics parts stores, evaluation kit, and so on. Especially, microcontrollers with flash memory are adequate for amateur hobbiest, because:

Hitachi H8 series is one of the most popular flash microcontrollers. It is very popular for hobbiest in Japan, because Akizuki electronics (the most famous kit developer/store in Akihabara) sells small H8 board kit about 4,000 yen.($40!!)

H8 is a middle-class microcontroller, and have resources (RAM, ROM, I/O functions) enough to run C codes.


1.2 Cross-development environment for H8 microcontroller

To develop programs for H8, you need:

  1. C compiler
  2. Assembler
  3. Linker, object format converter
  4. Library and startup routine
  5. Flash programmer
  6. Debugger (optional)

GCC and binutils by GNU [1] supports H8 as one of many supported CPU. These tools provides C compiler to object format converter in this list.

Cygnus provides simple C standard library for embedded CPU. It contains stdio , stdlib , string, math library. But it does not contains hardware-specific routine, such as file I/O and OS support. Note that printf and scanf are included in file I/O.

Flash programmer is a tool to put bootstrap code to H8, and write program binary to the flush ROM. It communicates to H8 with serial I/O (RS-232C).


1.3 Installation Procedure

To install whole development environment to your Linux box, follow these steps:

  1. Get H8 manual from Hitachi web page. Programmer's manual and hardware manual are available. Hardware manual is useful for programming I/O hardware.
  2. Install GCC, binutils, and newlib. See Installing GCC, Binutils and Newlib, Chapter 2.
  3. Make ld scripts for your target. See Linker Script, Chapter 3
  4. Prepare CPU board and writing hardware. See Hardware, Chapter 4
  5. Install H8comm, a flash programming tool. See Executing your own code, Chapter 5


[ Abstract ] [ Copyright Notice ] [ Contents ] [ next ]
Free H8 development environment under Linux
version 1.0, 24 Nov 1999
Muneyuki IWATA kp9m-iwt@asahi-net.or.jp