Multiple screens are a real productivity booster for every developer: it extends your ‘real estate’ and allows you to have more things visible all the time. Personally I always have a dual screen system in use. Well, except when I’m traveling. But I wish I would have it there too! Eclipse started to support the multiscreen environment already a while back. Continue reading
I use a Intel processor to write this text, and this processor is is using Little Endian for the byte order. This is about Endian, not Indian :-).
Many processors I have programmed were Big Endians. With the addition of Freescale Kinetis (an ARM Cortex M4) and DSC in MCU10.2, I have a daily mixture with Big Endian (S08, ColdFire, …) and Little Endian (DSC and Kinetis).
The term “endian” is described nicely in the IEN 137 written 1980 by Danny Cohen:
“ON HOLY WARS AND A PLEA FOR PEACE“.
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I mentioned in Go Reference that MCU10 and eclipse come with a comfortable infrastructure: you add, remove, rename source files and set compiler options: managed make will take care and creates the make files for you. Make files are such a great thing because they allow you do to pretty much everything.
Classic CodeWarrior uses a different approach without make files. Exporting the project as make file did not really work, so make files were not something you could have used easily in classic. With the eclipse based MCU10 make files are the heart of the build system. In most cases using the managed make system is perfectly fine. But for a bare metal enthusiast it makes sense to use my own make file instead.
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Question: How can you distinguish an embedded programmer from a non-embedded programmer just by looking at his debugger?
Answer: The embedded programmer has at least one Memory View open, while the non-embedded programmer probably does not care.
Memory View in CodeWarrior for MCU
Well, this is maybe a too simplistic answer, but I think it has some truth. An embedded system programmer cares a lot about the memory of his system, and so do I. My post on flash programming was the aspect of permanently programming the memory. This one is is about RAM and Flash.
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Demonstrating software and tools for a smaller or larger audience is always a challenge. What looks good directly in front of your screen might not get the same attention if projected on a wall. Especially if you are browsing through the source code and you need the audience to follow this. What I have found very useful in CodeWarrior is the ability to configure it using colors. One thing I have configured is to show the current line in a different color:
Highlighted source line in CodeWarrior
MCU on Eclipse 