Good news for all the Eclipse and ARM lovers: Atollic have announced this week at ARM TechCon 2015 in Santa Clara that their TrueSTUDIO ‘Lite’ is now free of charge with unlimited code size. 🙂

atollic TrueSTUDIO

💡 TrueSTUDIO is currently only available on Windows host. You might look into the NXP Kinetis Design Studio v3.x which is available for Linux/Mac/Windows which is Eclipse based, free-of-charge and unlimited.

I we have used TrueSTUDIO for several projects as it nicely incorporates Processor Expert (see “Adding Processor Expert to Atollic TrueSTUDIO“). But it was not easy usable for student projects because of licensing and code size restriction.

When Starting the ‘lite’ IDE it gives you a reminder dialog to consider the upgrade to ‘Pro’:

Atollic Studio Upgrade Dialog

💡 Previously, the ‘Lite’ version was limited to 32 kByte code for ARM Cortex M4 and 8 kByte for ARM Cortex-M0+.

Basically it is a ‘unlimited code size IDE without advanced analysis and debugging features’.

Downloading (and installation) is simple and easy: I go to http://timor.atollic.com/truestudio/ and download/install the IDE. No registration needed. The download is Windows only, so all non-Windows OSes are not supported.

The Atollic TrueSTUDIO is a ‘polished’ Eclipse distribution: which means that for a normal Eclipse user many of the dialogs and options are different from stock Eclipse or other distributions. For someone new to Eclipse that is probably an advantage, as new users are less likely to be lost in all the Eclipse features. For other users which are familiar with Eclipse or coming from other Eclipse distributions that can be confusing as things are ‘different again’. The TrueSTUDIO extensions try to hide some of the Eclipse complexity:

project target options

The other thing I have found is that still some functionally is turned off in the Lite version. Not sure if there is more apart of what is announced on the Atollic web site as differences between the new ‘Lite’ and ‘Pro’ version:

Toolchain Version change is not supported in Lite

Summary

It is nice to see that another Tool vendor for ARM is getting rid of code size limitation and focus on their true add-on values. Probably the success of ‘unlimited’ IDE’s as the Freescale Kinetis Design Studio has influenced what is happening in the market. I think Atollic made a smart move and will put pressure on the other tool vendors to do something similar. Atollic TrueSTUDIO for sure is a good alternative for someone getting new to Eclipse and the ARM world.

The good news is for Windows users, as there is no Windows or Mac version available. So for my classes I still will stick with stock Eclipse plus Freescale Kinetis Design Studio as this covers Windows, Linux and Mac. But for other projects the TrueStudio Lite could be a good alternative, especially for Newby users or simple projects which do not need all the power and analysis features I can get with stock Eclipse.

And alone that Atollic is making their download very easy with no registration hassles (all other vendors: why do you have to make using your products so painful and why do you need to collect all my data?) makes it worthwhile to consider the TrueSTUDIO ‘Lite’.

Happy Freeing 🙂