[tcf-dev] TCF and microcontrollers/uC (e. g. AVR or ARM Cortex)

[Rainer Poisel <rainer.poisel@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear list,

recently I have spent some time on learning what TCF is and how things
actually work. To me it's an impressive and powerful framework. Now I
was wondering:

Would TCF be suitable for communicating with systems that do not have
an operating system such as microcontrollers?

My use cases would be to download code or to debug downloaded code. I
stumbled upon the TCF porting guide
(http://git.eclipse.org/c/tcf/org.eclipse.tcf.git/plain/docs/TCF%20Agent%20Porting%20Guide.html)
and I have seen that Xilinx supports TCF for their devices.

Regarding the ARM Cortex devices (e. g. STM32F4) - is there anything
available yet for these 32-bit microcontrollers? I don't know whether
the Xilinx approach works for all ARM Cortex microcontrollers. I have
used the CDT together with GDB to debug applications but would it be
possible with the TCF as well?

And how about even more resource limited devices such as AVR microcontrollers?

What would be the preferable approach to support such devices -
implementing a TCF agent that runs on a host and works as a bridge to
the microcontroller (e. g. TCF over TCP/IP to a custom serial
protocol) or running a stripped down agent implementing the serial
protocol directly on the microcontroller?

Thanks in advance for giving me a few hints,
  Rainer