MPC555 Compiler Setup

  1. Download and install Codewarrior for the MPC5xx from the Freescale website. The download comes with a 15 day license. Another 30 day evaluation license can be requested from Freescale.
  2. The disk which came with the PB555 board contains v3.0 of the Motorola Quickstart tools. v4.0 can be downloaded from Freescale's website (search for 'MPC500QUICKSTARTSW'). When installing, the tool will bitterly complain that it can't find an installed copy of CodeWarrior. Ignore it.
  3. After installing, open codewarrior and in the "remote connections" tab of the preferences dialog, select "P&E BDM" and press change. IO Delay should be 0 and FPU Buffer Address should be 0x003fff00.
  4. Create a new project, using the "EPPC New Project Wizard". Select the PowerPC 555 as the processor and the '5XX Chip' as the board. When prompted to select a connction protocol, select 'P&E BDM'.
  5. Clear out all the code, except for a while(1) loop, and attempt to build, download, and debug the project. In the event that an exception occurs, you have a problem. Go the the P&E micro website and run through their troubeshooting flowchart for the CABLE_PPC unit. In particular, we needed to change the parallel port to AT mode in the BIOS.
  6. Under project settings, add access paths to the header files included in the QuickStart kit. These can be found at:

The QuickStart kit also includes an AppConfig interface designed to simplify configuration of some on-die features. We couldn't make it work, and in general it seemed unnecessary. We did, however, copy in an appconfig.h from one of the sample projects, which allowed us to make peripheral calls.

In general, we found that simply accessing the peripheral registers through structs defined the System header files was by far easier than attempting to use the AppConfig tool. The exception to this may be using the TPU, which we didn't, but it appears that the AppConfig tool and associated libraries make this processor substantially simpler.

Also, as of CodeWarrior v5.9, an incompatibility exists between Codewarrior and MS Office. It only occurs after Office sets itself up when you first run it for each user, so our workaround was to create a user account for codewarrior, then run codewarrior as that user (use the 'Run As...' feature of explorer). A good sign that you didn't do this is Codewarrior crashing every time you try to open a file selection dialog (usually on file open, save, or directory selection.)