Atollic TrueSTUDIO no longer supports Kinetis?

[RufusVS]

I've inherited a project developed with Atollic TrueStudio, which was apparently a great IDE and build system a few years ago but has since been sold to ST, who is making it free, but only to support ST devices.  It is not listed on the NXP/Freescale software page as near as I can tell.  Can I just live with my older version of TrueStudio, or should I port it to a different IDE?  How similar are eclipse-based IDEs?

[Alice_Yang]

Hi Rufus Smith,

Just add,  the  MCUXpresso Configure Tool includes IDE, SDK ,and pins, clocks , peripheral configuration tools,

also it is free, this is the recommend tool for development kenetis , LPC  and I.MX RT MCU.

About the detial introduce you can have a look at NXP website:

MCUXpresso Software and Tools for Arm® Cortex®-M cores|NXP 

Also you can also porting to KDS, it is also supported by NXP .

Hope it helps

Have a great day,
TIC

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[mjbcswitzerland · Accepted solution]

Hi Rufus

If you just need to build projects there is no need to upgrade. The IDEs use GCC and are essentially executing a make file so you can also build without even opening the IDE. The IDE delivers on top of that debugging capabilities, an editor and various other plug-ins.

The various Eclipse based IDEs are not fully compatible with each other which means that you can't import a project to KDS or MCUXpresso from an Atollic project that will immediately work(although if you know details about the format of the project files it may be possible to edit them to get things set up correctly).

However, it is relatively simple to take a project's source files and create a new project in another Eclipse IDE that will then work. I maintain the uTasker project in various Eclipse based IDEs (KDS, CodeWarrior, MCUXpresso, CodeComposer, S32 Design Studio, Atollic, AVR Studio, CooCox - maybe a couple of others in the past too) and basically I never liked the way that they work nor had the patience to work out how to adjust things that don't work between them; so I just created a project using the same source files for each of them individually.

Regards

Mark

P.S: Atollic (Lite) has been free for quite some time - even before ST took it over. Basically ST has now put as stop to use of it for those which aren't using ST parts (although it can still be used for any Kinetis part as long as you don't need a set-up wizard for a specific part and don't need register views).

uTasker developer and supporter (+5'000 hours experience on +60 Kinetis derivatives in +80 product developments)
Kinetis: http://www.utasker.com/kinetis.html

[RufusVS]

Thanks for your insights Mark!

     This project was originally outsourced and although the engineering company mostly knew what they were doing, there was

enough miscommunications for this to get off track enough to be cancelled and brought back in-house.   It is not a complicated

bunch of tasks that it has to do, but there  sure is a complicated source tree setup in the build environment:  kinetis chip support

package, freemodbus, and some others.  With ST dropping any kind of legacy (competitor-chip) support for former Atollis users

(plus some other bad experiences with ST, though not mine)  we are not inclined to change chips to an ST just to continue using

Atollis software.  However, I wanted to try a bare-bones build for this freescale chip MKM34Z256. Have you found MCUXpresso

does a good job of setting up a minimal framework, the embedded equivalent of a "Hello World" for their chips?  Or have you 

found other IDE's better?

Incidentally, my boss and I looked at your site, and we may decide uTasker may be a good way to go.  You clearly know your stuff.

We'll probably get in touch with you off-list about your product.

   Thanks again,

   Rufus