Codewarrior will no longer be supporting new Kinetis parts????

[samsaprunoff]

Good day All,

I just received an announcement from Freescale that any all new (i.e. after May 2014) Kinetis parts will no longer be supported by Codewarrior and that one will need to use yet another software tool... either one from the standard commercial vendors (i.e.Keil, IAR, etc) or the newly released Kinetis Design Studio IDE...

Dear Valued Freescale Customer,

Please be advised of a change coming to the Freescale CodeWarrior for Microcontrollers product that affects only users of Freescale Kinetis microcontrollers.

The current Kinetis portfolio of ARM® Cortex®-M4 and Cortex-M0+ MCUs is and will continue to be supported in the Eclipse-based CodeWarrior for Microcontrollers product.  However, new Kinetis devices introduced after the recent release of CodeWarrior for Microcontrollers v10.6 (released on April 2), will not be supported.

What does this mean?  There is no immediate action required.  However, as you integrate new Kinetis devices (those released from May 2014 onward) into your solutions, you will need to migrate to one of the following integrated development environments:

1. One of the Freescale Kinetis MCU featured IDEs à www.freescale.com/KIDE
   • Atollic®
   • Green Hills Software®
   • IAR Systems®
   • Keil®
2. Kinetis Design Studio IDE from Freescale à www.freescale.com/KDS
3. Other Kinetis tools option

This is somewhat nasty, as now Codewarrior - Kinetis users will have yet another software tool to support, learn, etc, but also this has the potential to fragment current and future Kinetis projects..  Perhaps I am being too responsive to this announcement and perhaps the complementary KDS will be great, but this just seems extreme.  May I ask as to what is the motivation to do this?

Cheers,

Sam

[mnorman · Accepted solution]

Hi, Sam, Mark and other CodeWarrior Users,

I'll try to clear up a few things on the CodeWarrior Kinetis changes, Kinetis Design Studio (KDS), and the motive behind them. 

First, KDS.  Kinetis users have been seeking a completely free IDE solution for some time. Freescale MQX has been a great success--we are providing a quality, commercial grade product at no cost for the software, but it typically required users to purchase an IDE to use it to its fullest. Enter Kinetis Design Studio, a free IDE based on open source Eclipse and GNU technology and completely free from size restrictions.  We have architected KDS to utilized stock Eclipse whenever possible so that we can more easily keep up with the state-of-the-art.  Since it is based on Eclipse with Processor Expert pre-integrated, users of CodeWarrior (or other Eclipse based tools) should feel right at home. We are also working closely with P&E and SEGGER to integrate their GDB solutions that take advantage of their hardware interfaces.  While KDS does not natively support advanced features such as trace and profiling, there are many Eclipse plug-in options that provide advanced capabilities. We are leaving the door open for our partners and the wider ecosystem to add value.

The Freescale Kinetis team has recently released some other interested software packages with the Kinetis SDK and the new unified Kinetis bootloader.  These projects and more will be adding and maintaining KDS native projects in their future releases (as well as native projects for *many* commercial tools).

KDS also marks a shift in IDE strategy for our ARM-based microcontroller products (aka Kinetis).  CodeWarrior is a long-established toolchain that supports many Freescale products and it is not going away.  There is significant investment in CodeWarrior for several products such as the next generation QorIQ Layerscape architecture.  However, the ecosystem for ARM-based MCUs is thriving with many commercial IDE solutions to choose from. CodeWarrior for MCUs is the primary toolchain for S08, DSC, ColdFire, and other proprietary Freescale architectures, but not so for ARM based Kinetis devices.  So, we've made the strategic decision to stop competing with the many commercial tools available for Kinetis, maintain CodeWarrior for MCUs for our proprietary architectures, and to provide a free, basic IDE option for Kinetis. 

I hope this helps explain and makes you feel like less of an "outsider".  I'd encourage you to explore the options that make the most sense for you.  We created this page to help you explore some of those options: Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) for Kinetis MCUs. KDS will be a good choice for many, but not all.  The beta version will be ready by May 2nd and then you can give it a try.  In the meantime, you can checkout the evaluation versions of Keil, IAR, Atollic, GHS, and other IDE products if you like.

-Michael

MCU Software and Tools

[mjbcswitzerland]

Hi Michael

Thank you for the additional information - as soon as the KDS Beta is made available I will be trying it out.

What I don't really understand is why Freescael doesn''t just remove the CW code size restriction for Kinetis parts since it would have solved the main problem and avoided opening up further branches that need to be maintained, plus the new learning curves at the customer's side.

Personally I use Keil, IAR, Atollic, GCC, Codewarrior and Rowley Crossworks for Kinetis but in my experience CW is used by the majority of Kinetis users today (based on a survey of 450 Kinetis based projects over the last 3 years). Keil and  IAR are popular but Atollic for Kinetis is rare (mostly it is used by ST Micro based developers). From the survey of 450 users none used GHS - I don't think that GHS is available as an evaluation version and product prices are not published; I suspect that it crops up in Freescale references due to automotive type users who go for a high end, high reliability solution and probably don't shy the high-end costs, but these look to be the exception.

Regards

Mark

[iaingalloway]

Mark Butcher wrote:

What I don't really understand is why Freescael doesn''t just remove the CW code size restriction for Kinetis parts since it would have solved the main problem and avoided opening up further branches that need to be maintained, plus the new learning curves at the customer's side.

I believe the answer is where Michael says "We have architected KDS to utilized stock Eclipse whenever possible so that we can more easily keep up with the state-of-the-art."

Codewarrior as it is today  has diverged enough from stock Eclipse to significantly impact the maintenance effort. Moving to eclipse plugin model allows similar features, while staying current with eclipse developments.

[mjbcswitzerland]

Hi Iain

Thanks for pointing that out.

I do quite like Eclipse in form of CW because it was streamlined (according to the CW developers I talked with) so that it is responsive enough to be usable. Some Eclipe versions are so bloated and slow that you need to start the program the night before so that it is ready for working with the next day (exaggeration of course but I do find myself doing other project work while the IDE actually starts or has its frequent 2 minutes "thinking break" where nothing reacts for a while).

As noted, I will be switching to KDS as soon as it is available.

Regards

Mark

[iaingalloway]

I believe the first release of  KDS is now public and available for download: KDS_IDE: Kinetis Design Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

[robertboys]

Hello

Keil MDK is an excellent alternative:  you can use the ARM compiler or GCC.  There is also a Eclipse front-end or use the uVision IDE.

Completely CMSIS compliant and supports CMSIS-DSP, CMSIS-RTOS, CMSIS-DAP, and more. Plus P&E OSJTAG and Segger J-Link.

Has an MQX Awareness system.  www.keil.com/freescale/mqx.asp

Also Processor Expert compatible.  www.keil.com/appnotes/docs/apnt_235.asp

There is a special MDK Freescale for $745.  One year license with tech support included.  At the end of the year, purchase another yearly license.

There is also a free version:  MDK Lite compiles up to 32 K code and data.  www.keil.com/mdk

Plus a version for all ARM Cortex-M processors.  Contact Keil sales for all the details.

There are labs for KL25, K20, K60D and K60N.  www.keil.com/appnotes/docs/apnt_232.asp   www.keil.com/appnotes/docs/apnt_243.asp   www.keil.com/appnotes/docs/apnt_249.asp

MDK has lots of easy-to-use examples for many other boards.

Appnotes on using Cortex-M processors - list is on 2nd last page of the labs.  Plus new Getting Started with MDK 5 pdf download:  www.keil.com/mdk

Keil Middleware:  TCP/IP, USB, Flash file systems and CAN.

Serial Wire Viewer and ETM trace completely supported.  MTB instruction trace too on Cortex-M0+

How they all work are in the labs !

See www.keil.com/freescale for more information.

Get one of the labs and browse though it and see what Keil offers.  We work hard on Kinetis support and have many existing customers (big and small and in between) using Keil for Kinetis.

Also have DS-5 for Cortex-A and Vybrid:  www.arm.com/ds5

Bob Boys

bob.boys@arm.com

ARM

San Jose, California

[mjbcswitzerland]

Hi Sam

See the following: New KDS_IDE: Kinetis Design Studio

At the moment I don't see the full logic in what is happening:

- CW has been a commercial tool (with the exception of the Special Edition) which has been purchased by users for their Kinetis projects but they will now need to move to a new tool for new devices

- The new tool is complimentary so can be used for development (existing and new devices) but is not offered with "support" as CW was (no licensing)

- Users requiring "support" for new devices (that is, support as provided for licensed CW) have to move to a different commercial solution (as noted in the choice 1 above)

I am sure some existing CW license holders may have a problem swallowing that.

CW has also been the "mainstream" tool for developers of Kinetis projects so it will affact the majority of present Kinetis users.

Technically we will need to wait and see as to the real pros and cons of every day development use. I moved all projects to CW GCC recently since the Metroworks compiler doesn't support the M0+ core as used by KL parts. This took a good day of work so hopefully the new KDS (only GCC) will be close enough to be able to import CW GCC projects without too much loss of time. Once in KDS I expect that CW will effectively die for Kinetis parts since maintaining two Eclipse flavours of one project (like CW and Atollic) is a nightmare as it is, without having to maintain CW, Atollic and KDS ones!

Since KDS is complimentary it effectively means that Freescale is not interested in selling tools for Kinetis parts in the future (since CW will not inherently support new Kinetis parts - in fact this means that the debugger won't always display the registers correctly but the compiler will of course still work - as will the debugging tools as long as there are no incompatibilities in new silicon). Since there has been a lot of effort involved in CW developments (the CW10.5 for example is a huge improvement on the original CW10.0 and has become quite a good tool) I was wondering why Freescale didn't just make the Kinetis part of it complimentary (if that is the strategy to attract users to the silicon) so that there was no (possibly) big change in direction for many existing users?

My feeling is that the only real option is to embrace the KDS as soon as possible for Kinetis work - there must be a good reason for it and there will be no choice in the long-term.

I downloaded the 1.3GByte CW10.6 today but probably won't actually install it since it doesn't seem to make any sense now that the direction is known - as soon as the KDS download becomes available/approved I'll be converting again...;-)

Regards

Mark

Edit: The web pages are in flux at the moment and I have seen that there is now an optional commercial support package mentioned.

[samsaprunoff]

Good day Mark,

Thank you for your post, as it comforting that I am not alone in wondering what all this is about and also the extra work this will create going forward.  Indeed, perhaps you are right that Freescale wants people to move away from Codewarrior... The whole new Kinetis part segregation just seems extremely odd and makes no sense to those of us on the "outside".

It is also interesting that there has been no response from anyone from Freescale to tell us why this approach is better ...  no response tends to speak volumes.

Cheers,

Sam

[williamely]

You definitely aren't alone. I'm evaluating Eclipse based alternatives to CW/KDS now.

KDS isn't for me since I was told my Tracelink would not work with it. I may change my mind after I get my hands on the beta next month since it's likely that whatever I have to do to get the Tracelink running on another IDE will work for KDS.

Atollic True Studio looks like a commercially supported version of what BlackNight does with his Eclipse based MCU projects. I might post something about my experience with the demo later this week.

[takaoyamada]

Greetings William Ely,

Currently P&E is working to add support for the TraceLink to both Atollic TrueStudio and Kinetis Design Studio in the latter half of this year. TraceLink can currently be used with both products for debugging without the Trace functionality.

If you have any specific questions or concerns, please let us know in the P&E forums or support request ticket system.

Best Regards,

Takao Yamada

P&E Test and Design Engineer

[williamely]

Thanks, that's good to know.