The cool thing with Processor Expert is that it gives me guidance through the settings. And there is a nice (rather hidden feature) which proposes me values I can enter:
💡 First, switch to the non-Tabs (classic) view, as the classic view is using the screen real estate better, and shows you *all* the information needed, and does not hide some.
So if you have some values to correct because other settings have changed:
Values to Enter
When I create a new Processor Expert project for a board I already have the components configured, then an easy way to transfer components from one project to another is to copy-paste the components. In the ‘source’ project I select the components I want to use, choose Copy (or CTRL+C shortcut on Windows):
Copy of Processor Expert Components
When I started the McuOnEclipse project back in 2012, I did not expect that it would create that much of attention :-). So far I’m sharing the project files on GitHub (see “McuOnEclipse goes Git“). GitHub is excellent for sharing sources, but not a good way to share release (binary) files. It is somewhat ok for small/few files, and initially that worked well for the few Processor Expert files (see “Processor Expert Component *.PEupd Files on GitHub“). However, with the amount of components and binary releases, the GitHub repository gets bloated. So I’m performing some maintenance work, and so I’m moving binary releases to a new McuOnEclipse SourceForge site.
McuOnEclipse On SourceForge
When using a bootloader (see “Serial Bootloader for the Freedom Board with Processor Expert“), then I usually protect the bootloader FLASH areas, so it does not get accidentally erased by the application ;-). When programming my boards with the P&E Multilink, then the P&E firmware will automatically unlock and erase the chip. That’s not the same if working with the Segger J-Link, as it but requires extra steps.
Protected FLASH Pages with Processor Expert
Student: “Professor, my application does not work!”
Professor: “What is the problem?”
Student: “I don’t know, but the LED on my board is not blinking.”
Professor: “Can you step through the port initialization sequence and check if the clocks are initialized correctly?”
Student: “I have pressed the ‘Run’ button, I’m not debugging”.
Professor: “Why are you not debugging?”
Student: “I always do a ‘Run’, and I do ‘Debug’ only if needed.”
Professor: “Ahhhhhhrrrrgggg!”
Run and Debug in Eclipse
Clearly, I’m not immune to the ‘déformation professionelle‘. I very rarely use ‘Run’, because it simply does not offer much value compared to ‘Debug’ during development. If using ‘Run’ and then there is a problem, I have to ‘Debug’ anyway, why not ‘Debug’ from the beginning? It is simply not an efficient way to work for me. Or I’m missing something?
At FTF 2014, Freescale made the announcement that CodeWarrior won’t support all the new ARM Kinetis devices coming out in the future: they will be supported with the free-of-charge Kinetis Design Studio (KDS) instead. As for myself, this is a big shift from a well established CodeWarrior toolchain to something new. A question which came up recently several times in the forums and in other posts is: how do CodeWarrior and KDS compare with each other?
CW vs KDS
Eclipse is not the fastest and snappiest IDE of the world, but in my view the most versatile and open one. And as with any tool: using it the wrong way does not make it better. Sometimes I have students in my classes which complain that Eclipse is slow, even on a decent machine. Looking at their notebook screens and Eclipse workspace usually tells me right away what they are doing ‘wrong’: there are many, many projects open in the workspace, the most I have seen was more than 50 projects (yikes!!!)!
Many many projects open
Eclipse projects have the nice features that they can link to files and folders: so instead of having the physical file, it is just a pointer to a file. This is very cool as that way I can point to shared files, or keep files in a common place referenced from projects, and so on.
Linked Folder and File in Eclipse
As with most things in Eclipse, there is not a single way how to do things. So I’m showing in this post several ways how to link to files and folders.
Typically I can create with my build the file I usually need (like an S19). See “S-Record Generation with gcc for ARM/Kinetis” how to do this in CodeWarrior, or “Binary Files for the mbed Bootloader with Eclipse and GNU ARM Eclipse Plugins” how this works in Kinetis Design Studio. The basis of all this is the GNU objcopy utility (see “S-Record Manipulation with GNU objcopy and Burner Utility”). So what if I just have an S19 (S-Record) file and need it in a different format, e.g. as .bin (binary) file for the mbed bootloader which only accepts .bin (raw binary) files?
Converting S19 to BIN
Sometimes I have source files in my project which I do not want to get compiled (or excluded from build). Because as I’m using the ‘managed make’, all source files matching certain extensions (like *.c) are automatically included into the build.
To exclude a file from build, I right-click on it to get to the properties. There I can select a check box to have it excluded from the build:
File Excluded from Build
MCU on Eclipse 