KDS vs IAR?

[dave408]

Free is nice, right?  That's why I'm evaluating KDS at the moment for a small project, which involves making MQX and RTCS work.  I'm simultaneously evaluating IAR, and at the moment I'd have to give the advantage to IAR.  For whatever reason, it seems like IAR projects are much easier to start from the ground up and actually get something that compiles and runs.  With KDS, I find myself chasing missing header files.

Even the provided demos are easier to run out of the box with IAR.  Take the web_hvac demo as an example.  In IAR, I merely open the build workspace which contains all of the K64's dependencies and build it.  Then I add the web_hvac project, set it as active, and debug.  Voila, it works!

I haven't found any equivalent to an IAR "workspace" or Visual Studio "solution" in KDS, so I manually added all of the projects like bsp, psp, etc.  Then I added the web_hvac project and built it.  I would get compiler error after error because of missing header files.  I spent a bunch of time searching the file system for them, which included:

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\usb\host\source\rtos\mqx\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\mqx\source\io\tfs\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\mqx\source\io\sdcard\sdcard_esdhc\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\mqx\source\io\sdcard\sdcard_spi\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\mqx\source\io\sdcard\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\mqx\source\io\esdhc\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\mqx\source\io\usb\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\mqx\source\io\gpio\kgpio\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\mqx\source\io\gpio\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\mqx\source\io\lwgpio\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\usb\common\include\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\mqx\source\io\enet\macnet\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\mqx\source\io\enet\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\mqx\source\io\io_null\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\mqx\source\io\io_mem\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\mqx\source\io\i2c\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\mqx\source\io\spi\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\mqx\source\io\dma\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\mqx\source\io\serial\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\mqx\source\io\lpm\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\mqx\source\io\cm"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\usb\host\source\include\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\mqx\source\psp\cortex_m\cpu\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\mqx\source\psp\cortex_m\compiler\gcc_arm"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\config\common\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\config\frdmk64f\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\mqx\source\include\"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\mqx\source\psp\cortex_m"

"C:\Freescale\Freescale_MQX_4_1\mqx\source\bsp\frdmk64f"

And now I'm at a point where when I build, it can't find sdcard_esdhc.h, but the location is right there in my includes list!  Perhaps I've maxed out the number of includes allowable due to the awesome Windows command line length limitation, so now I am going to look for how to use "include files", hoping that I can just pass a filename that has all of my include paths in it...

Has anyone had a similar experience that can provide me with some suggestions for improving this workflow?  Thanks!

[cesarrabak]

Dave,

For the first part of your post, I think it is to be expected KDS being a newer IDE be slightly less "mature" than IAR.

Depending upon your needs and requirements a full fledged commercial product may a better route and the converse may prove true as well with Free solutions (be it in the "free beer" sense as the more 'political' FSF [and other Open Source definitions) sense.

So this is not a thing we can help very much without further information.

On the second issue, it seems to me that what you are missing is the parametrization of your project in KDS to include the MQX headers.

Note that right now KDS does not support MQX "directly", you have to go to the MQX for KSDK, then you should use the KSDK drivers for your project.

Except if you're in a great hurry I suggest you wait until the end of the year for the release of KSDK1.1 version.

HTH

--

Cesar Rabak

[dave408]

Correction, I'm no where near the 8192 character limit, as far as I can tell.