For the Eclipse and Processor Expert lovers of this world: there is another Eclipse based IDE you can use: ThunderBench made by Emprog:
ThunderBench for ARM Eclipse Startup Screen
They support a range of ARM based devices, including the Freescale ones I’m using. So I downloaded the v3.24 30 day trial from their download page last week. Finally I have found some time to try it out. Could this be an alternative to use my Freescale FRDM boards with Processor Expert?
This week I saw on the IAR website that they have released the new IAR Embedded Workbench v6.7 for ARM. I was still on 6.5 using the free code size limited ‘Kickstart’ version), so I thought it would be a good time to upgrade to the v6.7. And there are good reasons as the connection to Processor Expert makes things much easier now.
In my earlier post “S-Record Generation with gcc for ARM/Kinetis” I documented how to have the ARM GNU gcc toolchain to produce a S19 (Motorola (or now Freescale) S-Record) file. Here are a few more tips on that subject:
Eclipse based IDE’s have typically one limitation: the IDE has not much scripting capabilities. Yes, I can use things like JUnit for testing, but if it comes to build and debug C/C++ applications, then support gets really rare. An exception to this is CodeWarrior for MCU which features a command line version of the IDE which can be used for test automation as I used it in one of my tutorials. What I missed so far is to have a command line interface for Processor Expert to generate code. This is now possible with CodeWarrior for MCU10.5 :-).
The Eclipse IDE is in my view the best IDE in the world :-). But it is not the fastest one: All the functionality and comfort has a price, and such a Java and highly flexible IDE requires its resources. The Eclipse community is continuously addressing that concern, and for example the Eclipse Juno 4.2 IDE in CodeWarrior for MCU10.5 shows this nicely: things are much smoother compared to the Eclipse Indigo 3.7 in MCU10.4. But if you feel that you do not want to use Processor Expert because it is too slow, then I have a trick how to improve performance by a factor of 10 :-).
Sometimes I have ‘multiple definitions’ in my projects: this means that I have functions defined in one source files, and I need to ‘overwrite’ one or more with a version in another source file. For example I have a source file with utility functions (Utility.c), and I want to overwrite some of these functions with a different implementation in a different file (MyUtility.c). How can I do this?
What could be wrong with this code:
volatile uint16_t myDelay; void wait(uint16_t time) { myDelay = 0; while (myDelay<time) { /* wait .... */ } } void TimerInterrupt(void) { myDelay++; }?
For everyone who wants to build a Do-It-Yourself toolchain for Kinetis on Linux, I recommend to read the following excellent post by Karibe:
Setting up Linux opensource build and debug tools for freescale freedom board FRDM-KL25Z
He describes how to get OpenOCD with CMSIS-DAP working with Eclipse on Ubuntu to debug the FRDM-KL25Z board.
Happy Linuxing 🙂
So far I have covered in this tutorial series how to install ARM GNU gcc, adding Eclipse, followed by adding GNU GDB debugger, and then adding Processor Expert. I’m using FreeRTOS a lot in my projects, and luckily there is a Kernel Awareness Plugin available for FreeRTOS for GDB in Eclipse. This tutorial is about how to install and use it.
Queues and Tasks
This is the first part of a multi-part tutorial on setting up a free and functional GNU gcc + Eclipse + debugger environment for use with the Freescale FRDM-KL25Z board.
In this first part, I’m showing how to install the GNU ARM tool chain to build a ‘blinking LED’ application for the FRDM-KL25Z. With 100% free tools 😉
Blinking Red RGB LED made with free tools
