The open-source GNU tools provide a rich set of tools to help developing software. Some are clearly more for the high-end application development. But many of the tools are applicable for the more restricted embedded software development process as well. One is gcov, or the GNU Coverage Tool. Coverage is essential for the testing phase, as it tells you what part of code have been used and ‘covered’. This article describes how GNU coverage can be added the NXP S32 Design Studio IDE.
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
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
When using an RTOS like FreeRTOS, sooner or later you have to ask the question: how much time is spent in each task? The Eclipse based MCUXpresso IDE has a nice view showing exactly this kind of information:
FreeRTOS Runtime Information
For FreeRTOS (or that Task List view) to show that very useful information, the developer has to provide a helping hand so the RTOS can collect this information. This article shows how this can be done on an ARM Cortex-M.
By default, when debugging an embedded application, the target usually stops at main():
stopped in main
That’s usually fine, but what if I want to debug the code out of reset?
In the age of high-resolution graphical LCDs using a character display might look like a bit anachronistic. But these displays provide a lot of value for me as they are robust, available in different shapes and number of lines. And such a character display can be a better solution for an industrial application.
hd44780 display with NXP FRDM-KW41Z Board
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.
EGit with Eclipse
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
How can I open a project folder location in the system explorer?
Starting with Eclipse Oxygen, the project properties have a button for this in the Resource settings:
Show in System Explorer
MCU on Eclipse 