eclipse IDE cannot flash device

[estie]

Posted on April 14, 2017 at 19:26

I have been using the AC6 eclipse IDE on Nucleo F411RE for some time. About every week or two it locks up the system and I have to power cycle to get my computer back

:(

Last time this happened, I has to reinstall the AC6 software from Eclipse to get it functional again ( this also seems to be needed frequesntly ).  I can now build my project OK but it will not flash the board.

I get an exit code 127 and 'terminated'.

There is brief msg before that but the IDE stupidly erases it and just leaves me the error code.

At the moment I have totally useless development system. What can I do to find and fix the problem.

Thanks in advance.

#eclipse

[Tesla DeLorean]

Posted on April 15, 2017 at 20:54

Makes you wonder if there aren't better development systems?

You might start by looking at how OpenOCD is working, and perhaps try using the ST-LINK Utilities to flash the board and make sure that works, and that you have the latest firmware and drivers.

[estie]

Posted on April 15, 2017 at 21:23

I quite agree. Eclipse is such a mastodon, it takes hours ploughing through the massive range of possibilities, configurations and menus to get anything done and when something goes wrong ( quite often ) it takes even longer to work out what is not working and exactly where, about five menu levels down in some config what needs changing to fix it.

It is also incredibly slow to step when debugging. Sometimes it can take 5s to step to the next line and update the display.

I had to configure it to use openOCD and my installed gdb because of ncurses version problems. It seems to have dumped that config  now .

I did find out that I can flash the chip by right clicking on the project in the project menu and selecting Target | Program chip.

The toolbar icon still gives the useless error message. The whole thing is pretty unreliable.

[estie]

Posted on April 19, 2017 at 11:28

Having flashed the chip the debugger fails to start:

Error in final launch sequence

Failed to execute MI command:-exec-runError message from debugger back end:Don't know how to run. Try 'help target'.Don't know how to run. Try 'help target'.

This eclipse suite is beyond useless. I'll have to look at command line gdb

[AvaTar]

Posted on April 19, 2017 at 12:31

This eclipse suite is beyond useless.

While I personally do not like Eclipse, this is beside the point.

The flashing and debugging is done via the debug pod driver and gdb. The latter (gnu debugger) is a separate executable, which communicates to Eclipse via IPC (socket interface).

I can imagine the gdb implementation of your IDE is messed up, or you have some driver issues.

BTW, when I am forced to use Windows, EmBlocks/EmBitz always worked well for me, and it's free.

But AFAIK, there is no Cube interface/integration yet.

[estie]

Posted on April 19, 2017 at 20:23

Thanks, I'd found the problem was that Eclipse had generated new debug and run profiles without asking or informing me and had reverted to the supplied openocd and gdb which do not work because of version conflicts. This is why I had changed the profiles to use the Fedora package version in /usr/bin .

Much of the problem is that it just fails with a dumb message like error 127 which leaves you guessing as to what happened and with a labyrinth of menus and configs to start the guessing game in.