From time to time, I scratch my head and ask myself: Gee, that file icon looks interesting and different, what does it mean? What I’m wondering about is on Eclipse Icon Decorators. Label and Icon Decorations allow additional information to be displayed in an item’s label and icon. Very powerful. But as with many powerful things: if you don’t know it, it might cause harm or confusion. Unfortunately, that’s not so easy to find out.
Yesterday was my ‘lucky day’: My Kinetis-L Freedom board arrived :-). This board is really nice and features the KL25Z from the recently announced Kinetis L Family. And guess what is the first thing I want to flash on that processor? Yep: some FreeRTOS tasks. But to get there, a few important things have to be sorted out:
Working Sets are a very useful feature in the Eclipse Framework (see Working Sets Explained). But: with a standard Eclipse distribution it is not possible to import or export working sets. The good news is: the AnyEdit plugins (see 5 Best Eclipse plugins) provides that missing functionality. The other good news is: Buried in the Freescale MQX 3.8 distribution for Eclipse CodeWarrior, there is an even better implementation for the Eclipse Working Sets.
With USB goes medical I have a serial-to-USB (CDC) support for my TWR-S08MM128 board. What makes these devices targeted for medical applications interesting for other applications are features like bootloader support and a CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check) engine. But how can I generate the required CRC numbers with MCU10?
One of the new features in CodeWarrior for MCU10.2 is the ability to build in parallel. Does not sound exciting? Well, when I tried this the first time in MCU10.2, I noticed immediately the reduction in build time: twice as fast compared to MCU10.1!!!. Wow! This improvement is based on using a make utility which can spawn multiple jobs on multicore host machines. CodeWarrior tries to use an optimized setting to make the build as fast as possible using parallel builds. The question is: is it really optimal?
I just ran into this problem: I know I have this file in my project, but still the linker complains that it cannot find the symbols: “Symbol X is undefined”? It must be something obvious, but somehow I cannot see it?
Symbol Undefined Linker Error Message
Processor Expert is great: it generates initialization code and driver sources for me. This makes it a great knowledge and source base for non-Processor Expert projects too. Wondering how to initialize the SCI? What are again the register settings to use the CPU with a 6 MHz clock rate using an external crystal in low power mode? Lets generate a Processor Expert project to find out. Then copy-past the drivers or parts of it into my non-Processor Expert project. But How to do this?
With “Eclipse and PC-lint: Linticator” I have a plugin to lint my sources in a comfortable way. But I can do this as well without a plugin. For this I use a batch file with a build configuration, plus settings to get the PC-lint messages into the Problems view. Yes, this does not sound easy, but is very doable and straight forward once I have set it up. It gives me complete control on every little detail. Here is how I do it… Continue reading
PC-lint from Gimpel has set the standard for static code analysis: it is used by many companies developing safety critical applications. Additionally PC-lint can check the MISRA rules which are standard for many coding guide lines. PC-lint has detected many subtle bugs in my sources. Thank you, PC-lint!
CodeWarrior classic provided a plugin for the PC-lint compiler: To bad that this does not exist in the eclipse based CodeWarrior. You might think that given PC-lint so popular, there should be an eclipse plugin available? Yes, there are many attempts on this: all of them did not work well enough for me. The good news: There is the Linticator eclipse plugin. The bad news: it is not for free.
I admit: I’m a big fan of eclipse.
But there is one thing I have missed from the ‘classic’ non-eclipse CodeWarrior for MCU: the ability to create hierarchical builds with subprojects.
It was sooooo simple and easy in classic CodeWarrior:
