• Industry Mergers: Many mergers are happening in the industry. In 2016, Freescale Semiconductor merged with NXP Semiconductors, and both provided Eclipse-based IDEs to their customer base. This led to the merger of the IDEs, and last week, NXP released the MCUXpresso IDE.
• MCUXpresso IDE Overview: It is basically "LPCXpresso on steroids" and supports both NXP Kinetis and LPC devices (ARM Cortex-M0(+)/M4/M7). It inherits the Pro edition option from LPCXpresso and is free with unlimited code size. It is available for download from [http://www.nxp.com/mcuxpresso...] and has a community-based support model.
• Documentation: The IDE has an electronic documentation accessible from the help menu and the installation folder. It includes a Quickstart Panel with a blue debug button for launching a debug session, which is the recommended way. There is also a default green debug icon, but it should only be used if a debug connection is configured.
• MCUXpresso SDK: The IDE comes with legacy LPCOpen support for LPC devices and uses the MCUXpresso (formerly Kinetis) SDK for other data-driven functionality. SDKs can be downloaded from [https://mcuxpresso.nxp.com/] using the SDK Builder and imported into the IDE.
• New Projects: Projects can be created or imported from SDK examples. The SDK Wizard allows selecting a device or board and choosing what to use in the project. There are options for library and memory settings, and imported example projects can be customized. The IDE uses the GNU Tools for ARM Embedded Processors version 5 and can import legacy LPC projects easily.
• Debug Probes: The IDE supports various debug probes, including P&E probes, SEGGER probes, and LPC-Link/LPC-Link2. It offers new features for Kinetis Design Studio users, such as support for the LPC-Link2 probe with CMSIS-DAP firmware. Using the blue debug icon is important for proper debugging, and the probe discovery feature automatically creates launch configuration files. The IDE also offers a "Develop" perspective for debugging.
• Global Variables: MCUXpresso offers a "Global Variables View" to solve the problem of not showing normal global variables in Eclipse. It also has the "Peripherals+" view, which extends the memory view.
• FreeRTOS Support: The IDE includes support for FreeRTOS with thread awareness and NXP FreeRTOS Kernel views for Tasks, Heap, Timer, and Queues. This saves students the effort of loading a separate plugin.
• Conclusion: The MCUXpresso IDE combines the features of Kinetis Design Studio and LPCXpresso, providing a unified and modern IDE with nice debugging features. The author plans to write more articles about it and is open to suggestions for topics.