First steps with the Microchip PIC32 Ethernet Starter Kit (DM320004)
part II

I received this Ethernet Starter Kit from Farnell for evaluation. The kit is available with order code 1778059 from Farnell. You can find more Microchip development kits and tools at this link.

The kit contains a development board with a 32-bit MIPS4k PIC32 microcontroller, a 10/100 Ethernet port, an on-board debugger and programmer, and an OTG USB port. You can get the User's Guide and code examples from the Microchip ESK page. Microchip has a software library collection for their line of PIC16/PIC18/PIC24/PIC32 microcontrollers called "Microchip Application Libraries" or MAL. This collection includes the TCP/IP stack the kit uses.

The first part of this article can be read here.

In this step, the full firmware is compiled from source. Thus you can experiment with customizing the TCPIP library, eg. stripping unneeded features such as SNMP, SMTP, upload handling, etc. For this step, we will need the Microchip Application Libraries.

Make sure you have MPLABX and C32 correctly installed and the starter kit is connected to your computer. These steps are detailed in part I of this article.

Download the Microchip Application Libraries from http://microchip.com/mal - choose Beta Linux, the actual version (v2011-10-18 as of writing). This library can be installed as a normal user, no need to get root.

$ chmod +x microchip-application-libraries-v2011-10-18-beta-linux-installer-v2.run
$ ./microchip-application-libraries-v2011-10-18-beta-linux-installer-v2.run

I choose installation directory ~/MPLABXProjects/MAL

Start MPLABX, then choose File/Open project. Browse to ~/MPLABXProjects/MAL/TCPIP/Demo App and open the MPLAB.X project directory. Don't care about the "Configuration loading error" messages.

select the "MPLAB: C32-PIC32_ETH_SK_ETH795" configuration as seen on the screenshot.

Edit the project properties by right clicking on the project "TCPIP - Demo App" and selecting "Properties". Select the Conf: C32-PIC32_ETH_SK_ETH795 item from the categories, and modify the Hardware tool to SKDE PIC32 and the Compiler toolchain to C32 (see picture)

Select the "Build the Project" button. If you see "BUILD SUCCESSFUL" at the end of the messages, you can press the button "Make and Program Device". This will upload the program to the board.

Now open the URL of the board. If everything is fine, you will see that the stack version is now v5.36 and the build date is changed to the actual date.