The recent release of e2 studio 2.0 represents a major upgrade to an already very capable program. Renesas re-architected the program from its previous version—which was based on Eclipse Helios—to support Juno (v. 3.8) and Eclipse C/C++ Development Tools (CDT v. 8), supporting all the advances in these two tool suites since their previous release. e2studio 2.0 supports the RL and RX families of Renesas MCUs, including the new RX111 family.
Since it’s built on the open source Eclipse framework, e2studio users can choose from over 1,400 plug-in tools to customize the development environment for their particular needs. e2studio 2.0 includes build-phase plug-ins for the Renesas, KPIT Cummins GNU, IAR Systems, and Green Hills Software tool chains. In addition if you’ve been working with HEW or CubeSuite+ you can easily import your projects into e2studio.
e2studio 2.0 adds expanded debug functionality, including a Debug Virtual Console that includes a real-time memory view, real-time expression view, trace, and virtual I/O. The program also includes debug plug-ins for Micrium’s μC/probe and FreeRTOS as well as a GNU Debugger (GDB) interface with Debugger Services Framework (DSF) extensions.
Once you have things up and running the Performance Analysis View (Figure 1) shows how long it takes to execute a section of code. You can set up to two counters to measure execution cycles, interrupt cycles, exception cycles, or the time between any two events. You can then save the results to an XML file to compare the results after you’ve made changes to your code.
Figure 1: e2studio Performance Analysis View
The Profile View (Figure 2) displays profile results based on trace data. The results show function name, the full pathname, the start address, the execution count, the execution time, and the average execution time. As with the performance analysis, you can save different profiles and the split the screen to compare them after you’ve edited your code.
Figure 2: e2studio Profile View.
Since it’s based on an improved and restructured version of Eclipse, note that e2studio 2.0 not an update from earlier 1.x versions of the program. After you download the program you can install it in a separate directory, but you can save confusion and disk space if you simply uninstall the older program. Note that you cannot update to e2studio 2.0 by simply selecting Check for Updates from the Help menu in 1.x versions.
When you start up v. 2.0 the program will recognize your installed tool chains. To add updated plug-ins select Install New Software from the Help menu and select the site from which to download it. You can find instructions for doing this on the Updating via Update Site page. In the future you can then check for update versions of e2studio 2.x by selecting Check for Updates from the Help menu.
For more information on e2studio 2.0 check out the e2studio flyer, e2studio tutorials, and the e2studio community.