I’ve been playing with the MSP430 microcontrollers for a while. I’m a fan of using open source tools whenever possible, so I’d like to use mspgcc instead of the TI supplied CCS or IAR compilers. Recently I ran into a thread on the 43oh forum detailing a plugin that a user named XPG wrote for Eclipse.

Everything seems to work fine in the latest version (as of 2012-08-12) of his plugin with the exception of mspdebug. Eclipse seemed to be unable to communicate with the debugger for some reason. The steps that I followed to get the plugin working were the following:

1. Download latest Eclipse.
2. Add the http://eclipse.xpg.dk to the Eclipse software sources.
3. Install the bundled tools for your platform (Linux 32-bit or Linux 64-bit). There is a pitfall when using the Eclipse bundled with your distribution. The precompiled mspgcc binaries are installed in $eclipse_homemsp430-toolchain. If you don’t have permission to write to the Eclipse directory, this step will fail.
4. Download the latest git version of mspdebug. Compile and overwrite the version shipped with the msp430 Eclipse plugin. You will need libreadline-dev and libusb-dev installed for mspdebug to compile correctly.

The instructions by XPG in his video should all work now.

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