In Scripting, the Debugger Shell and Debugger Shell: Test Automation I was exploring how to use the Debugger Shell for automation. For my lectures at the university I need to program multiple boards with the same application. I don’t want (and need) a debugger for this: all what I need is a ‘Standalone Flash Programmer’: the ability to flash one or multiple boards without debugging.
A central concept of the Eclipse framework is the concept of a workspace. The workspace holds project and project references, among with other settings. I’m using multiple workspaces all the time, and in parallel. How to know which workspace I’m using? By default, the CodeWarrior Eclipse IDE main window comes up like this:
Default CodeWarrior Eclipse Main Frame
From time to time, I scratch my head and ask myself: Gee, that file icon looks interesting and different, what does it mean? What I’m wondering about is on Eclipse Icon Decorators. Label and Icon Decorations allow additional information to be displayed in an item’s label and icon. Very powerful. But as with many powerful things: if you don’t know it, it might cause harm or confusion. Unfortunately, that’s not so easy to find out.
The development cycle does not end with debugging. Debugging is something manual, but for testing and automation I want to develop scripts I can run in an automated fashion. For this I use a tool in CodeWarrior: the Debugger Shell as command line debugger and using TCL as scripting language. This gives me a powerful way into automation and scripting with the debugger: from basic access to memory, to stepping and controlling the execution up to programming the flash memory.
Using breakpoints is central part of debugging. I’m usually debugging my applications in flash memory. Because nearly all the microcontrollers I use have on-chip flash memory, and have more flash than RAM. With debugging in flash I limited by the number of hardware breakpoints. And here is the advantage with debugging code in RAM: availability of ‘unlimited’ software breakpoints. But how does this all works, and how to make efficient usage of hardware breakpoints?
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.
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…
MCU on Eclipse 