Eclipse for SDCC

Although I use MIDE-51 as a major IDE, I still seek for the best (free) IDE for developing Microcontroller Programming. The combination of Eclipse, CDT and SDCC is an alternation tools for 8051 Microcontroller C Programming.

Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle. Eclipse is used for Enterprise Development, Embedded and Device Development, Rich Client Platform, Application Frameworks and Language IDE.

The CDT is Eclipse's C/C++ Development Tooling project. It is an industrial strength C/C++ IDE that also serves as a platform for others to provide value added tooling for C/C++ developers.

The eclipseSDCC project aims to provide full support for the open source Small Device C Compiler (SDCC) from within the eclipse/CDT development environment. This allows embedded 'C' applications for 8051 and Z80 devices to be developed using the fully featured eclipse IDE. EclipseSDCC supports CDT managed make projects. In managed make projects CDT manages the build process by creating and maintaining the underlaying makefiles. CDT keeps track of source dependencies and can automatically rebuild the target when needed.

To install (for Windows)

1. It requires Java Runtime Environment (JRE), I download only JRE not SDK and install it.
   
2. Downlaod Eclipse SDK 3.2.1 for Windows (120 MB) and extract it to c:/eclipse. In the directory it contains eclipse.exe which is an executable.
3. Download CDT 3.1.1 (September 29, 2006) and extract it c:/eclipse, this will prompt to replace plugins and features directory.
4. If you have already installed SDCC for Window, skip this step. If you have no SDCC installed, read this first.
5. Download eclipseSDCC-1.0.0, when you extract the file, it contains plugins and features directory. Copy the two direct to c:\eclipse.

Now the installation have been completed and you can find its manual in c:/eclipse/plugins/net.sourceforge.eclipsesdcc_1.0.0/help/index.html.

Eclipse for SDCC is quite large when compared it MIDE-51. However, you can manage project in Eclipse whereas MIDE-51 still have no this feature in the present version. Here is a screen shot, you should see this dialog.

Related Links

• Installing Eclipse (pdf)
  
• http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2006/cmsc132/EclipseTutorial/install.html