Creating your own apps, C. using the eclipse ide – Pololu Wixel User Manual
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Using Eclipse with the Wixel SDK to develop
Wixel applications.
Creating Your Own Apps
Now that you know how to compile apps and quickly load them onto the Wixel to test them, you are ready to
develop your own Wixel apps. You can either modify one of the existing apps in the SDK or create your own app.
To create your own app, simply copy one of the existing app folders and change the name. You do not need to
modify the Makefile when you create a new app; the Makefile will automatically detect the app as long as it is
in the apps folder. When you are developing your app, you can use all of the commands above except you should
replace “example_blink_led” with the name of your app (the name of the subfolder in the apps folder). For more
information, including documentation of all the libraries in the Wixel SDK, see the
10.c. Using the Eclipse IDE
You can develop Wixel applications using any text editor.
If you use the free, open source Eclipse IDE, you can
benefit from some of its advanced C/C++ editing features.
The following is a tutorial on how to set up Eclipse for use
with the Wixel SDK.
1. Install the Wixel SDK on your computer and
compile an example app by following the instructions in
the previous sections.
2. Download and install the
If you are a
Windows user, we recommend that you download the
32-bit version of Eclipse, even if you have a 64-bit
operating system. You may need to install a Java
Runtime Environment (JRE) before you can run
Eclipse.
3. Run Eclipse. It will ask you to choose a workspace folder. Eclipse does not allow the workspace and
project folders to be the same. Therefore, we recommend making a new folder called something like
eclipse_workspace
, moving the
wixel-sdk
folder inside of it, and choosing that new folder to be your Eclipse
workspace location. By doing this, you can avoid having a large number of files in your workspace. You can
switch your workspace location later if you need to.
4. After choosing your workspace folder, you will see a welcome screen that says “Welcome to the Eclipse IDE
for C/C++ Developers” and has several circular icons on it. Click the icon with the yellow arrow in it to go to
the Workbench.
5. From the File Menu, select New > C Project. This will open up a dialog entitled “C Project”.
6. For the Project name, enter
wixel-sdk
. The Location box should now show the correct location of your
wixel-sdk
folder. Eclipse will show a warning at the top of the window that says “Directory with specified name
already exists.” (this is good).
7. Under Project type, select Makefile project > Empty Project. It does not matter what toolchain you select.
8. Click the Finish button to finish creating the wixel-sdk project.
9. Press Ctrl+B or select Project > Build All to build the project. This is equivalent to running
make all
in
the
wixel-sdk
folder. You can see the build output by selecting the Console tab at the bottom or by going to
Window > Show View > Console.
10. In the left-hand pane, you will see the “C/C++ Projects” or “Project Explorer” view. This view should
display one entry entitled
wixel-sdk
which represents the project you just created. Double click on the project
name to expand it and see all the folders and files inside it.
Pololu Wixel User's Guide
© 2001–2014 Pololu Corporation
10. Writing Your Own Wixel App
Page 56 of 64