Debugging static variables, especially ‘static locals’ is sometimes challenging. Especially ‘static local’ debugging depends on the compiler capability how they are encoded in to the object file. I have found out that at least with CodeWarrior for MCU and ARM/Kinetis this works straight forward. Only ‘Watch Expressions’ need special attention.
Yesterday was my ‘lucky day’: My Kinetis-L Freedom board arrived :-). This board is really nice and features the KL25Z from the recently announced Kinetis L Family. And guess what is the first thing I want to flash on that processor? Yep: some FreeRTOS tasks. But to get there, a few important things have to be sorted out:
Ever wondering what could be a keyboard shortcut for something in Eclipse? In my post on 10 Best Eclipse Shortcuts the question came up how to traverse through all the open files in the editor. Finding a shortcut is easy if you know the The Mother of all Eclipse Shortcuts :-). I press CTRL+3 and enter a search term like ‘switch’, and it shows me all shortcuts with ‘switch’ in the description:
CTRL plus 3 shows all shortcuts
In CodeWarrior and Eclipse, the Problems view shows all kind of messages, from all open projects in the workspace. That way I have especially all the build messages in one view. The Problems view keeps the messages listed, until I have them resolved. By default, if I have multiple projects open in my workspace, it will show all the messages of all projects:
Problems View with Multiple Messages and Projects
With many messages and many projects, that might be overwhelming, as messages can be mixed for different projects and files, especially with parallel build enabled. How to change the settings to have the messages listed just for a single project?
Eclipse and CodeWarrior are great. But as with most great things, they get even better if I can customize it for my needs. As outlined in my earlier posts (Eclipse Full Screen Plugin, Hide and Show Eclipse Toolbar, Maximize Eclipse Views) there is already great flexibility.
The great thing with blogging is: I receive great comments, questions and ideas. The great thing with Eclipse/CodeWarrior is that the extensions are almost unlimited :-). For my earlier post on hiding the toolbar I received a tip for another way which even is better: a plugin to switch Eclipse into full screen mode. Here is how to install it and how it looks…
As outlined in my earlier post about hiding the toolbar: it is important to me that I have a flexible way to use my screen real estate. There is another thing I need frequently: I’m using a small Eclipse window like this one:
Screen real estate is important to me. Especially working on a small notebook screen I want to get the most out of it. And I know: all the cool (and fancy) UI items in Eclipse have a price.
So how to get more space for important things like my source files? Eclipse has feature to hide the toolbar completely. For this I simply use the context menu and select ‘Hide Toolbar’: Continue reading
I’m chasing down a weird include problems in my project: Somehow it looks like the compiler is including the wrong file, causing strange compiler errors. I admit: the include order with all the #defines is pretty complicated, most of it I have inherited from an open source project. How to know who is including what, which files is included by whom? what is included directly, and what is included indirectly?
If I’m debugging my application in Eclipse or CodeWarrior, it shows in the Variables view the local and global variables of the current Thread and stack frame only:
Debug View with Variables View
This makes sense as this is usually where my focus is. And this is good from a performance point of view: The debugger does not need to read a lot of other variables from the target which I’m not interested in. But the question is: how to show the variables which are in other files if I really need to look at them?
MCU on Eclipse 