Remote Development of Mobotware Using Eclipse
It is possible to use an Eclipse, running locally on one's computer to remotely develop Mobotware residing in Kalman. This tutorial will describe how to set up eclipse so that one can:
- use full features of Eclipse including indexing, content assist, error highlighting and much more...
- build on the automation servers from inside Eclipse
- debug the code running on the SMRs while stepping through the source code and observing variables in Eclipse
The following description is for Eclipse Galileo (Eclipse 3.5.2), hopefully, the steps will not be very different in future versions.
There are essentially 4 things to do:
- Install Eclipse and the required plug-ins
- Mounted on the local file system the Mobotware directory (or a sub-directory of it) residing in Kalman.
- Set up an Eclipse project for remote development
- Configure Eclipse to make sure all the nice features are available
Install Eclipse
One first needs to install Eclipse, along with the necessary plug-ins for C++ development as well as remote development. Installing Eclipse and enabling it for C++ development differs substantially between operating systems:
Windows
It is non-trivial to set up an Eclipse C++ development environment under windows. It is not particularly hard, but it's an integration between Eclipse, a plug-in called CDT and GCC ported to windows. It would be futile to list the steps as of writing this tutorial, as the process changes slightly depending on the versions of the named software elements. Try googling "C/C++ development using Eclipse under Windows" and come back when you have this working properly.
Now, it is necessary to install two other plug-ins for our task:
- TM and RSE (Remote system Explorer)
- Eclipse C/C++ Remote Launch
As you've probably already noticed while installing CDT, one installs Eclipse plug-ins through Help->Install New Sofware.... The drop down list next to Work with lists some software sites, but the ones we need are probably not there. Click on the 'Available Software Sites' link just under the Add... button to get a list of software sites compatible with your version of eclipse. You need to add:
RSE - http://download.eclipse.org/dsdp/tm/updates/3.1 - for TM and RSE CDT - http://download.eclipse.org/tools/cdt/releases/galileo - for Eclipse C/C++ Remote Launch, under CDT Optional Features
Note that the above links and names might differ slightly depending on the version, but you're choosing from a list anyway.