Tag Archives: Tips&Tricks

About things you might not know, or could make your life easier.

Using Parallel Builds: what is optimal?

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One of the new features in CodeWarrior for MCU10.2 is the ability to build in parallel. Does not sound exciting? Well, when I tried this the first time in MCU10.2, I noticed immediately the reduction in build time: twice as fast compared to MCU10.1!!!. Wow! This improvement is based on using a make utility which can spawn multiple jobs on multicore host machines. CodeWarrior tries to use an optimized setting to make the build as fast as possible using parallel builds. The question is: is it really optimal?

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Traps&Pitfalls: Overlapping Interrupt Priorities

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It happens to me that I run into a really, really nasty problem. I spend hours (if not weeks) to get it resolved. Strong coffee and the problem keeps me up at long nights. I think every embedded system engineer knows what I’m talking about. Yeah, most of the time it is my fault or an oversight. But once in a while I’m convinced that I have found a real bug. Then I report it back to the vendor to fix it. I hope my report will prevent another engineers to run into the same problem. Or that I learn something else as a by-product. Oh yes….

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10 Best Eclipse Shortcuts

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Yes, eclipse is a very visual and GUI oriented IDE. But this does not mean that everything is mouse oriented. While programming I have my hands on the keyboard. So I want to do as much as possible with shortcuts and the keyboard. The good news is that eclipse comes with a great set of helpers built-in. Here is my list of my favorite hotkeys and shortcuts…

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Scripting: The Debugger Shell, Getting started…

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(This is the first in an occasional series around the scripting in eclipse and CodeWarrior. Post a comment – let me know what you think!)

Writing code should be fun, and debugging it is just a necessity because I rarely get it right the first time. Eclipse with its GUI is a great thing, and so is a command line interface. Luckily the CodeWarrior eclipse engineers have added that kind of tool for the CodeWarrior debugger: the Debugger Shell as command line debugger using the TCL scripting language. This gives me a powerful way to deal with the embedded target board: from basic access to memory, to stepping and controlling the execution up to programming the flash memory.

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Sneaking from Processor Expert

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Processor Expert is great: it generates initialization code and driver sources for me. This makes it a great knowledge and source base for non-Processor Expert projects too. Wondering how to initialize the SCI? What are again the register settings to use the CPU with a 6 MHz clock rate using an external crystal in low power mode? Lets generate a Processor Expert project to find out. Then copy-past the drivers or parts of it into my non-Processor Expert project. But How to do this?

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Linting without a plugin

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With “Eclipse and PC-lint: Linticator” I have a plugin to lint my sources in a comfortable way. But I can do this as well without a plugin. For this I use a batch file with a build configuration, plus settings to get the PC-lint messages into the Problems view. Yes, this does not sound easy, but is very doable and straight forward once I have set it up. It gives me complete control on every little detail. Here is how I do it… Continue reading →

Quick Access (CTRL+3)

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It is Easter time, and here is my Easter Gift in eclipse: Quick Access. If you are one of those developers who hate the mouse and want to do everything with your hands on the keyboard: this is definitely something for you. I admit that I had not noticed that feature, as it is buried behind menus. It is such a great functionality in eclipse (thanks for the hint, Teo!), but easily gets missed.

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Offline Registers

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The eclipse based CodeWarrior for MCU10.2 comes with many unique extensions of the eclipse platform, implemented by Freescale. One of these featured mentioned in my post is the ability to inspect the registers in an offline mode: The Offline Register view. How is this different from the Registers view?

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