Alrighty Then!

As a side-project I started to develop on the Arduino platform (more on the project-of-the-day later).

First Steps

Getting going on windows was easy: setting up Arduino 1.0.1, compiling and running the “blink” demo, changing the frequency etc … was straightforward.

Then: i found grbl. Flashing the premade 0.8a firmware from grbl – instant success.

Then: setting up the avr toolchain on a linux machine (Ubuntu 12.04), checking out with git, developing with joe and via the command line. Easy again.

Eclipse

Wanting some more comfort (and working on my Win7 laptop), i thought of running eclipse with an AVR plugin …  First thing you find is the “avr-eclipse”. It seems you have to install avr-gcc and avrdude separately …. Then i found the Arduino eclipse plugin … It’s reusing the Arduino SDK … so all the additionally required tools and headers come in one package.

Issues

Downloaded the current “Juno” release of eclipse in c/c++ flavor, installed the plugin from the Arduino plugin update site: http://www.baeyens.it/eclipse/update … creating a project didn’t work. Well, reading the plugin’s page a little more carefully revealed that it’s not yet compatible with Juno.

Downgraded to “Indigo”. Installed “Uncategorized/Arduino Eclipse Plugin/1.2.4″ version of it. Now setting up a project works. Imported grbl code … but: compile errors:

Description    Resource    Path    Location    Type
first defined here    serial.c    /grbl    line 109    C/C++ Problem
first defined here    serial.c    /grbl    line 158    C/C++ Problem
make: *** [grbl.elf] Error 1    grbl             C/C++ Problem
The type 'HardwareSerial' must implement the inherited pure virtual method 'Print::write'     HardwareSerial.h    /Arduino_Uno/arduino    line 64    Code Analysis Problem
multiple definition of `__vector_18'    HardwareSerial.cpp    /Arduino_Uno/arduino    line 102    C/C++ Problem
multiple definition of `__vector_19'    HardwareSerial.cpp    /Arduino_Uno/arduino    line 196    C/C++ Problem

Solution

After a lot of googling:

• remove the “=0″ from the write function in “Print.h” (make it non-virtual)

  ...
      void clearWriteError() { setWriteError(0); }
  
      virtual size_t write(uint8_t); // = 0;
      size_t write(const char *str) { return write((const uint8_t *)str, strlen(str)); }
  ...

• make the project NOT link against the aurduino library (gets rid of the “multiple definition”, grbl doesn’t use the default libraries anyway): delete the reference on “<project>/Properties/C/C++ Properties General/Paths and Symbols/Libraries”
• add “-CC:\dev\arduino-1.0.1\hardware\tools\avr\etc\avrdude.conf” (without the quotes!) as an “Other” option on the AVRdude “Other”-setup tab. If you now choose to automatically upload the hex file during the build process, avrdud will find it’s platform definition file.
• install “eGit” via the eclipse-integrated “Eclipse Marketplace”, create a repo on github, spawn a personal repo from chamnit’s “edge” version, do some changes … and commit.

Now grbl compiles without errors and the .hex file seems to have a “similar” size compared to the shell compiled version. I’ll test the firmware on the actual hardware tonight …

Update: uploading to the arduino works like a charm …