I very much liked the CodeRed Eclipse based IDE (see “Red Suite 5: Eclipse Juno, Processor Expert and unlimited FRDM-KL25Z“). But back in May 2013 CodeRed was acquired by NXP. I have not used much NXP devices for my projects, and as CodeRed was focusing on the NXP parts, CodeRed was not running daily on my desk any more :-(. Well, things might make a full back circle, as NXP announced back March 1st 2015 to acquire Freescale :-). And maybe as a taste how things might come out, the GNU ARM Eclipse plugin release from March 22nd 2015 includes a CodeRed debug view 🙂 🙂

That debug perspective mimics a CodeRed debug perspective. The advantage of this Eclipse perspective is that it works very well with small screens. This post is about adding this perspective to the recently release Kinetis Design Studio v3.0.0.

Installation

To install the CodeRed debug perspective, you need the GNU ARM Eclipse debug plugins. Freescale Kinetis Design Studio already uses these plugins, all what I need to do for KDS v3.0.0 is to get the update from the following update site:

http://gnuarmeclipse.sourceforge.net/updates

Then select the ‘GNU ARM C/C++ CodeRed Debug Perspective’ and install it.

Using the CodeRed Debug Perspective

To open a new/different perspective, I can use the ‘Open Perspective’ button:

Select the perspective to be used and click OK:

This switches to that perspective and makes it available in the Eclipse toolbar:

The CodeRed Debug perspective arranges the views similar to what was present in the RedSuite/CodeRed IDE:

Of course I can combine this with the ‘Breadcrumb’ debug view to make the source area even bigger:

Making CodeRed Debug Perspective the Default

So far so good. But when I hit a breakpoint, stop the target or do a new debug launch, Eclipse still uses the normal ‘Debug’ perspective. I need to tell Eclipse that I would like to use the CodeRed perspective instead. This leads to another powerful feature in Eclipse: I can tell Eclipse which perspective to be used for a certain application type or launcher. The setting is inside the menu Window > Preferences > Run/Debug > Perspectives:

Each of the different debugging connections (OpenOCD, P&E, Segger) can (or has to) be configured individually. With this, the debugger ‘stays’ inside the selected perspective.

Summary

The ‘CodeRed’ debug perspective is provided with the GNU ARM Eclipse sets of plugins, and mimics the ‘CodeRed way’ in any other Eclipse, including the Freescale Kinetis Design Studio. I like that view very much as it uses the screen real estate in a very good and logical way. Instead of changing the default Eclipse Debug perspective, that CodeRed plugin comes with a very good set of defaults. To make the CodeRed perspective ‘sticky’, I have to configure it in the Preference settings of Eclipse.

Happy CodeReding 🙂