MIPS Development board!

The other day I found a MIPS based development board and I knew I needed one.  I have loved the MIPS instruction set for a long time.  I bought a Creator Ci20 development board, which can be found at Imagination's web store.  I have found that most of the references to this board talk about Linux or Android, but I want to do bare-metal and work with real time operating systems on this board.

One brave developer embarked on a bare-metal project, which he hopes to get back to when he can. Nicholas's posts are listed out in his blog post: The CI20 bare-metal project.  His posts are really good and a great starting point into working with this board.  This is where I will start working from, reading his posts and building from his knowledge.  Thank you very much Nicholas for your project and detailed posts.

This being said, I grabbed crosstool-ng (latest version is 1.22) and built the mips-unknown-elf tools to work with the board in a bare-metal fashion.  First you must install crosstool-ng, then you use that to automatically build your tool chain.  If you want a list of the supported tool chain samples call crosstool-ng with the list-samples command: ct-ng list-samples.  This will print out a list of all the supported tool chain configurations it knows how to build.  I knew I wanted mips-unknown-elf, so I called crosstool-ng with the following command: ct-ng mips-unknown-elf and it built a configuration for the bare metal MIPS tool chain.  Finally, you tell crosstool-ng to build the tool chain for you with the following command: ct-ng build.  I left this to go about it's business while made myself a little adapter board.

The pin out for my existing TTL Serial converter don't match the board's pin out for the dedicated UART header. I don't want to continually reconnect jumper wires from the converter to the board.

I finished this, to notice that the tool chain was completely built, I think I now love crosstool-ng!

The tool chain appears to work, gcc complained about no input files, and gdb informed me that it was compiled to target mips-unknown-elf.

I have the tool chain, adapter for my TTL Serial converter, power adapter and Ethernet cable ready, I can plug it all together and power up the board.

I still need to: 

1. Create a Bitbucket repository to store the code for this project.
2. Setup the build system.
3. Setup Doxygen to generate documentation.
4. Setup a TFTP server to allow me to boot the board off development code easily.
5. Setup scripts for build process to copy the image automatically to the TFTP location.
6. Test to make sure board will boot the image from TFTP.