Something what I say quite often is: “Google is your friend”. It means that the answer to many questions can be found with an internet search engine. And I have to admit that I have to ‘google’ my own articles to find solutions for problems I feel I have seen in the past too :-).
But for the one problem below I did not find anything: not on my own blog, and not anywhere else in the internet:
Exception
I’m in the middle of the university exam season: means writing exams and do grading. The same time the new semester is approaching too and I need to prepare the new course material. For the classes using NXP parts I’m using the Eclipse based MCUXpresso IDE, and I just received the announcement that a new version V11.3.0 is available: time to check out what is new.
MCUXpresso IDE v11.3.0 (Build 5222)
Eclipse includes a background parser called ‘Indexer’ which is used to assist the developer with various kind of information, for example jumping to a variable declaration or definition. Basically it is a parser running in the background collecting information about the sources and building up that ‘index’ data base.
indexer debug output
The Eclipse CODAN (Code Analysis) plugin is part of CDT and is a powerful static analysis tool finding all kind of possible bugs and issues. Still to my surprise not many C/C++ developers take advantage of it maybe because they are not aware that it exists?
ups! Programming error detected by CODAN
In this article I show a few tips how to effectively use it, especially with the NXP MCUXpresso SDK.
The holiday break at the end of the year is always a good time to finish projects started during the year. This one is about my ‘MetaClockClock’ Version 3.
2020 with Red Hands on Blue
The NXP MCU-Link is a powerful $10 debug probe for ARM Cortex-M devices and works with the NXP LinkServer for debugging. The LinkServer does not an implement a gdb server, so it limits its usage e.g. for scripting or command line debugging. But as MCU-Link is also a CMSIS-DAP compatible debug probe, I can use it with OpenOCD which is open source and implements a GDB server. This article shows how I can use it with the MCU-Link.
Debugging FRDM-KL25Z with MCU-Link
The MCU-Link is a $10 CMSIS-DAP capable debug probe which works out-of-the box with the MCUXpresso Eclipse based IDE. This is great for development, but how can I programming with the push of a button or a script? The answer is no: there is an easy way to use the debug probe outside Eclipse from a shell script, and you can use that MCU-Link probe to do the job. This is especially useful as with the example below where I have to program 60 boards this week-end :-).
Batch Programming Boards with MCU-Link
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?
Having visibility and insights into a running system is highly valuable or critical: not only for optimizations but as well to verify the system design and behavior. In Getting Started with Microsoft Azure RTOS (aka ThreadX) I showed how to quickly run Azure RTOS. This article is about getting trace out of an ThreadX application and show it in TraceX.
Azure RTOS TraceX
Most of my students seems to prefer the ‘Dark’ desktop and tool theme. So this is getting popular, and I was reluctant to use it. But tools support is getting better (see MCUXpresso IDE) and I switched do the ‘dark’ side for now :-).
But what do you prefer? Not Eclipse in particular, but as a general color theme? Is it the ‘new’ Dark, black, darker-than-dark, … theme?
Dark Theme
Or is it the ‘classic’ Light, bright, white, … theme?
Light Theme
Please let us know:
Happy undarking 🙂
