The new year 2024 is coming, so time to close the current year with a new release: I’m pleased to announce a new release of the Processor Expert components, available on SourceForge and GitHub.
Sometimes it can be a challenge to update or add plugins to older software or Eclipse versions. The ‘CodeWarrior for MCU’ from NXP is legacy and replaced by the newer MCUXpresso IDE and tools, but I continue to use CodeWarrior for our older projects, and it still works fine after all the years and Windows host updates. However, trying to install from the standard eGit Update site fails:
I’m pleased to announce a new release of the McuOnEclipse components, available on SourceForge. This release includes several bug fixes, support for more devices, and updated components like FreeRTOS, MinINI, Percepio Tracealyzer and SEGGER SystemView.
SourceForge
Using Post-Build feature in Eclipse is a great way to augment a build with all kind of actions. What if the build takes a long time and you want to get notified? One way is to play a sound at the end of the build process.
A very useful feature in Eclipse is Ctrl+Shift+L which lists all the available shortcuts:
List of Shortcuts
Pressing Ctrl+Shift-L again will open up a dialog where I can configure them. But what if the shortcut or action is not listed there?
Eclipse has a great built-in source code parser and browser (aka ‘Indexer’). It is basically a built-in compiler which parses the source files and assists the user with code completion and navigation help, making Eclipse this awesome productivity tool. On the downside this background parsing could potentially slow down things, and therefore Eclipse has some default settings to prevent this. Unfortunately, the FreeRTOS Kernel ‘tasks.c’ file is above-and-beyond of a ‘sane’ source file and will hit the default limits: as a result the ‘tasks.c’ file is not indexed and things like ‘Open Declaration‘ might not work for the file ‘tasks.c’.
Open Declaration
As a VCS (Version Control System) I’m using git in all my projects. And not only for software or firmware projects: I’m using it for hardware design (KiCAD, FreeCAD, …) or for documentation (LaTeX, …) too.
The nice thing with the Eclipse IDE is that it supports nice git integration, making importing projects from git repositories easy.
Import Projects from git
There are things which are game changer in the world of software development: one such event was when I started using a VCS (Version Control System): it changed for me how I keep and store my projects and settings. It even changed the way how I deal with non-software related items like documents or other valuable things: I started storing them in to a VCS too.
I’m pleased to announce a new release of the McuOnEclipse components, available on SourceForge. This release includes several bug fixes, extra support for the NXP S32 Design Studio and SDK and includes FreeRTOS V10.1.1.
SourceForge
In the C programming language it is good practice to pass values by reference (using a pointer), especially for large set of data. For example the following function takes a message string and pointer to integer data which then is printed to the console:
static void printData(const char *msg, const int *intBuf, size_t bufSize) {
puts(msg); /* print message */
for(int i=0; i<bufSize;i++) {
printf("buf[%i] = %i\n", i, intBuf[i]);
}
}
MCU on Eclipse 