Alternative IDE for ColdFires

[Ricardo_RauppV]

ColdFire guys ..

We  have used HC12/HC08 for years and its Codewarrior+debugger have showed us as a very nice and practical option.

We are migrating several of these designs to ColdFire V2.

After start it, we got very disappointed to CodeWarrior/debugger, once the debugger inside CodeWarrior is very not practical... poor offacilities to debug.

We don´t use OS, just C pure enviroment.

Could someone indicate us an alternative solution for debugger?

Freescale / Metrowerks

We write here our hopes you can improve (significantly...)  Codewarrior IDE for ColdFires with the same strong competence you made CW for HC-9S12/08.

Ricardo Raupp

[timmer]

Ricardo,

NetBurner has strong support for V2 Coldfire and is about to release a new IDE based on Eclipse. The release date is November 28th. They are fully ANSI C/C++ compliant and have done a really good job integrating the development, debugging, and deployment environments into a single user interface. They included a long list of great features that make development and debugging easier. They even included over the network debugging and programming. See the link below for more information.

http://www.netburner.com/embedded_eclipse.html

Be aware, NetBurner support includes a full RTOS based on uC/OS. I know you said you aren't using one, but they've done a great job integrating the stack into the RTOS. This makes the TCP/IP stack operate in the background transparent to your code. It's a nice feature for maintaining a coherent network connection without trying to synchronize stack interaction.

Tim

[timmer]

This was my first post and I just noticed my signature wasn't included, I work for NetBurner. The team has done a fantastic job putting this tool set together and I would recommend it to anyone considering doing a Coldfire design.

Tim

[Jaux]

Ricardo,

Even though I am fanatically loyal to Freescale, I cannot say the same about CodeWarrior.

I have invested in an embedded Forth spesifically developed for embedded processors, called SwiftX by Forth Inc. ( www.forth.com) and never looked back. I have the HCS08, HC12 and CF versions of SwiftX and I have found that I spend about 1/3 of the time from idea to deploy I used to using CW with ASM and C across all the 8 abd CF MCU's. I can strongly reccomend this.

Visit the site and get a demo version for your MCU and see for yourself.

Regards,

John Ulyate

[johntse]

dear jaux

i am also in your position, i uses freescale cpu exclusively but codewarrior is too expensive and can be complex to use

i am also well versed in forth

but forth inc's swiftx is not user friendly at all and their support is costly as well

although there are already many hcs08 cpu,s they only release a demo for gb60 and

there is no standalone file where you can change the setting to make it work for other cpu's

as i am also thinking of using swiftx to work on hcs08QE cpu, i discovered that i am having difficulty porting

from gb60 to other similar cpu

so that was why i am here because i needed help to do so and i was wondering if it is safe to use swiftx 

since forth inc dont even seems to support easy porting on similar cpu ( documentation totally silent on this )

i will try it if i can find good user forum or community support for it

so can you help me in porting the swiftx hcs08 version to hcs08QE cpus

thanks

[HenryMS]

After a little trouble at first, we have just started using the WinIDEA environment from iSystems. This requires an expensive debugger (ic3000 = £2,500), but has an advanced interface. Note that this does not include the compiler, i.e. the "winIDEA" uses the 'Code-Warrior' in the back-ground; but on the other hand it can be an economic option for more than 1 'CW' seat.