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
Typically a Processor Expert component creates two files: a header file and a source file. That’s fine for normal drivers. But this does not work well for more complicated things like an RTOS or communication stacks: these are built from a whole set of source files. So how can I generate multiple files with a Processor Expert Component?
As promised back in Percepio, I want to have it ported and working with the Freescale Cortex-M4/Kinetis in CodeWarrior. That’s what I’m working on now, deep into the night. While doing this, I had to generate a lot of trace data, and I used the script I presented in that earlier post: Setting a breakpoint in the trace buffer wrapper event and then export the data. But there has to be an even better way, and indeed there is one: Breakpoints with Special Effects!
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?
Writing Processor Expert components is not always completely independent of the compiler and underlying microcontroller. In many cases I need to know the compiler for which the source code is generated. Or I need to know on which CPU architecture the code shall run. For this I need to know the compiler and the CPU family.
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?
Technically, a normal user component can implement any RTOS. This is what I did with the Micrium MicroC/OS-II component. That way the component shows up in the ‘Embedded Components’ group. But how to make it showing up as RTOS component inside the ‘Operating System’ group as the FreeRTOS component? What I want is this: to show the RTOS component under the ‘Operating System’ group of my project:
FreeRTOS in the Operating System Group
Ah, a lot of work went into a new Processor Expert component, and finally it shows up in the component library:
default user icon
Oh, wait: *that* icon does not look nice enough for that amount of work behind the component?
In my previous post I mentioned the Drivers\Common folder which has ‘include’ files. These files are maintained automatically by the Component Wizard. But what is the purpose of these files?
The Common Folder has *.inc files which are included in the driver as ‘function’ header. The .inc file contains documentation about the function and parameters for that function.
What I describe here is an overview about the different locations, folder and files you will see if you are importing or developing a Processor Expert User component. I’m showing below example screenshot for the FreeRTOS component, as this is probably the most complex one I ever have created.
