Debugging MSP430 Using Eclipse

[Springuin] just posted a tutorial about debugging MSP430 projects using Eclipse. He read our feature about debugging under IAR, a proprietary IDE which TI offers as a code-limited freebie with the TI Launchpad. In that writeup we wondered if anyone would put together a tutorial using open source tools like DDD and GDB to make debugging easier for those that choose to use operating systems other than Windows. Even though he didn’t directly use those particular packages, this should work just as well.

Eclipse is a popular IDE for many different languages like C, C++, Java, and others. We’ve already seen it used to develop for the TI Evalbot on Linux systems. [Springuin] is using the Java-based IDE on a Windows system, and this is the first time we recall seeing directions on using an open-source alternative for programming with the TI Launchpad under Windows. That being said, the only real Windows specific parts are the steps necessary for communicating with the programmer. Since this method uses MSP-GCC and msp430-gdbproxy, it should be easy to do this under Linux as well. Use our tutorial to set up those tools if you haven’t already, then follow this one for a setting up and debugging in the Eclipse environment.

8 thoughts on “Debugging MSP430 Using Eclipse

  1. as an aside, it’s weird how people’s code in the same language can look so different.

    For example, I don’t put a space after the while or if (ever) but most of the time I put them IN the brackets splitting off the conditional. I also only recently started putting the leading curly brace on the same line of the while/do/if/switch

  2. On Linux the configuration of Eclipse is the same as on Windows (the paths to the executables are different, but that’s obvious) you can use mspdebug instead of msp430-gdbproxy by adding the gdb parameter to the commandline of mspdebug.
    And use “erase” instead of “monitor erase main” in the Startup tab of the debug configuration.

  3. I got this all setup per instructions but find the #include support very different. For example, I can’t include msp430.h Its simply not in the include folder and when I add it, it still doesn’t work right. So when i add the specific header for my mcu msp430g2231.h it gives this error:
    c:/mspgcc4/lib/gcc/../../msp430/include/msp430g2231.h:25:2: error: #error msp430g2231.h file for use with ICC430/A430 only

    And if i try adding the header that the author says is an analog of the 2231, msp430f2012.h I still get the same errors.

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