keil 5

Legacy stuff?

www2.keil.com/.../legacy

Does the newest version support the generation of checksums? I need to provide checksums on programming files so our contract manufacturers can be sure they are programming the correct image.

thanks..it worked...

"Does the newest version support the generation of checksums?"

Why would the newest version - or any version - of the Keil tools support generation of checksums?

Keil can't know if you want/need CRC-32, MD5 or something else - maybe even encrypted binaries. And they can't know where in the binary you might want to store any checksum. And it's quite likely that you want a header where you store a specific product identifier, to make sure that your binary intended for hardware product A doesn't accidentally gets programmed into hardware product B.

All Keil can supply, is a method for you to add a post-build step where you perform whatever crunching you might need to adapt the generated binaries to fulfill your specific requirements.

Microchip MPLAB gives a checksum at build time for all their processors. For ARM processors checksum generation is built into IAR tools. Our business process is to provide a label with checksum for all programmed parts as a quick check that the chip was programmed with the proper image. The vendor loads the image into their production programmer and matches the checksum the programmer shows to the checksum we provide.
I understand there are different checksums that can be generated and I can see them not embedding it into the programming file but this is a convenience that other tool providers give missing from Keil.

An interesting thing here is that the ARM chips can have a number of flash regions, that each need an individual checksum if used with a flash programmer.

My normal factory programming involves three different data blocks - two generated by two separate Keil builds (bootloader and main application), and the third is a configuration record that gets generated with unit-specific information.

Another thing - checksum of used bytes, or checksum of full memory region including following FF bytes?

Keil provides a convenient way to run external tools before/after various build stages as part of the project definition. This discussion about checksums has been done before, and it's trivially easy to write an app to package and checksum images, and automatically generate log/audit output. There are other pre-existing tools to do this (srecords, check8), but honestly it would take more time to understand the command line options on half of them, than to write a built-to-purpose applet from scratch.

Keil recognizes everyone does this differently, and provides a method to accommodate all of them.