If you followed my previous post on how to use the famous Eclipse IDE to program AVR microcontrollers, you may have noticed, that there are some shortcomings. Especially the creation of a new project is cumbersome, as you have to change the compiler settings from gcc to avr-gcc over and over again.
But there two small nifty plugins, called AVR Plugins for Eclipse, written by Matthew R. McDougal, to help us out.
Features
Plugin one mostly adds a new target to your IDE. This way it is much easier to configure your WinAVR compiler.
The second plugin adds a download button to Eclipse that enables directly uploading of the compiled hex file to the controller without leaving your IDE. For this purpose avrdude is used.
Installation
Installation is easy as for all Eclipse plugins.
- Download the archive from SourceForge.
- Extract the archive.
- Copy both folders into the plugins directory of your Eclipse installation.
- Copy the batch file avr-objsplit.bat into the bin directory of your WinAVR installation.
How does it look like
If everything went well, you should see the new AVR download button in the Eclipse tool bar. Selecting New->Project starts the project wizard. Now you can select the new AVR-Cross target.
To configure the upload process you have to choose Window->Preferences->AVRDUDE to bring up the following dialog. Select your COM port, type of programmer etc.
Conclusion
It works great for me and makes the development with Eclipse for AVRs much more comfortable. I have mailed Matthew about making the download process more responsive, as for now you get just an hour glass. Hope he puts it in.
Links
tinkerlog 
I downloaded the 2.0 of this plugin, but it doesn’t have any download icon on the menu bar nor any download interface – What did I do wrong?
This is a great plugin however to give an IDE to the AVR-GCC!
DLC
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It seems that the avr-objsplit.bat you mention is not in the extracted archive… Thus this doesn’t work at all for me. Did this change in an udpate of the plugin or am I do something wrong?
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Keith,
I think that may have changed in a newer version which I didn’t try.
Cheers,
Alex
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I’m having problem with the last release 2.1.1 …
I tryed out you simple code from your blog (https://tinkerlog.com/2007/06/03/programming-avr-with-eclipse-and-winavr/)
But when i build the project I have this error:
Severity and Description Path Resource Location Creation Time Id
make: *** [Test.elf] Error 1 Test line 0 1213435508687 62
Any suggestion?
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