Maybe Eclipse is ‘too much’, and you are looking for something different? The cool thing with Processor Expert is that while this is Eclipse based, you can use it easily with other tool chains like IAR Embedded Workbench. So you have the choice, and I have explored things a little with porting FreeRTOS for Cortex-M0+ to IAR :-).
IAR Embedded Workbench with FreeRTOS
In this tutorial I’m showing how use IAR with FreeRTOS and the Freedom FRDM-KL25Z Board, using Processor Expert components.
CodeWarrior for MCU10.3 comes with the ARM GNU 4.6.2 installed:
gcc 4_6_2 in MCU10.3 layout
What about switching to a different (newer) gcc?
Eclipse based CodeWarrior for MCU10.3 comes with gcc build tools for Kinetis/ARM cores. While it features the parallel build make, I noticed that especially for larger projects build times are not as fast as it should be. The good news is: I was able to cut down my build time to less than half with a simple change :-).
When I looked at the output folder where all the object and make files are stored by Eclipse, I noticed that it has as well the listing files generated:
Listing Files in output folder
I know for myself: the earlier I’m able to fix a bug, the better. So I’m always grateful for things which help me to find issues in my sources as early in the development process as possible. Eclipse and CodeWarrior already help me to find syntax errors in my code while I’m typing:
Eclipse highlighting syntax error
With the built-in syntax checker of Eclipse, this helps me many times to get things right without the need to build my code with the compiler. But when I’m able to compile successfully my code, this does not mean it is without bugs. It would be good to catch as many errors *before* downloading and running it on the target.
Ahrg! Again my ARM application crashed somewhere and I ended up in a HardFault exception :-(. In my earlier post I used a handler to get information from the processor what happened. But it is painful to add this handler again and again. So I decided to make things easier for me: with a special HardFault Processor Expert component :-).
After adding this HardFault component to my project, it automatically adds an entry to the vector table. So no manual steps are needed: having the component in the project and enabled will do the needed steps.
I have successfully used CodeWarrior for MCU10.3 beta version for many projects. With the advent of the final CodeWarrior for MCU10.3, I want to migrate my existing projects to the new and final version. First: my existing projects work as well in the final version, which is good news. But there are two things to change to take advantage of the final 10.3:
If you have not noticed: the final CodeWarrior for MCU10.3 has been released on the Freescale web :-).
It comes with a few changes compared to the 10.3beta release, and one is about the library configuration. I noticed that new projects created with the wizard are around 4 KByte larger than I expect them to be. For example my rather simple application below uses 8 KByte of code, where my expectation would be in the range of around 4 KByte:
text data bss dec hex filename 8644 24 1108 9776 2630 Freedom_2x16_HTA.elf
“Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”.
strikes again. Well, the modified version of it:
“Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, but it will wait until it really, really goes wrong”.
It is always amazing to see that systems having a fundamental flaw, they can work for a long period. Only that on day X my application crashes. And when found the problem, I’m wondering how in the world it was *ever* working with that bug in it :-(.
It is as bad as this: my application stopped in an unhandled interrupt service routine:
That does not tell much. I’m using Processor Expert generated code, and with this all my ‘unhandled’ vectors are pointing the same handler:
Continue readingThe GNU gcc tool chain integration in CodeWarrior/Eclipse MCU10.3 has a nice feature to show the code and data size of my application after linking (see this article how to enable this). So if I create an ’empty’ project with the wizard, get the code and data size without consulting the linker map file:
Console View with Code and Data Size
But wait! 2604 bytes of code for almost doing nothing? That’s not what I want! There are ways to get that puppy much, much slimmer. Down to 284 bytes 
.
MCU on Eclipse 