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:
- Download latest Eclipse.
- Add the http://eclipse.xpg.dk to the Eclipse software sources.
- 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.
- 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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