What's new in 2.3

This document contains descriptions of the significant features new to AVR Eclipse Plugin version 2.2.

 

Fuse and Lockbits Settings

Fuses / Lockbits Preview

There is now a descriptive preview of the selected fuses / lockbits.

Fuses Preview

Fuse / Lockbits tools

The direct hex values can now be

  • edit icon edited,
  • copy icon copied from the selected fuse / lockbits file,
  • read from mcu icon read from an attached MCU,
  • defaults icon set to a reasonable default value (derived from the Atmel part description files, not available for some MCUs), or
  • set to all 1s (all ones icon), all 0s (all zeros icon) or to nothing (clear icon)

Fuse and Lockbits Editor

If the direct hex values are edited, a new and simple to use fuse editor dialog can be used:

Fuses editor

Fuses files and Lockbits files

 

To reuse the same fuse and lockbits settings for multiple build configurations and even multiple projects, they can now be stored in special files and shared as appropriate. Fuses files have the file extension .fuses, while lockbits file end with .locks.

These files can be used instead of the direct hex values on the fuses / lockbits tab of the AVRDude project property settings page.

fuses file selection

Fuse / Lockbits File Wizard

There are two (identical) wizards to create new fuses and lockbits files.

fuse file wizard

Fuse / Lockbits File Editor

Fuse files and lockbits files can be edited with the same easy-to-use editor as the direct hex values.

lockbits file editor

Other new / improved features

New AVRDude Options

The -D option to inhibit the auto chip erase has been added.

avrdude -D option

While the AVR Eclipse Plugin now supports all options of the current AVRDude version 5.5, there is a new field to add future avrdude options not yet covered by the plugin.

avrdude other

AVRDude Invocation Delay

The plugin often executes avrdude repeatedly. This sometimes causes problems with USB programmer devices when the USB port is not released quickly enough by the previous avrdude invocation.

A new delay option has been added to the programmer configuration dialog to instruct the plugin to wait the specified amount of milliseconds between avrdude invocations order to give the USB port more time to close.

avrdude delay option

ATXmega Support

The plugin now supports the ATXmega series of AVR MCUs. The extend of the support depends on the installed avr-gcc toolchain. ATXmega MCUs are supported with avr-gcc 4.3.0 or later, but the current avrdude release 5.5 is still lacking ATXmega capabilities.

atxmega support

Improved Path Handling

On non-Windows systems startup time of the plugin was very slow on large systems, because large parts of the filesystem were scanned to find the installed avr-gcc toolchain. With version 2.3 of the Plugin, the system is scanned only once and the found paths are stored and used on the next startup. This greatly reduces the plugin startup time.

There is an option in the AVR paths preferences to restore the old behavior of scanning the system each time Eclipse is started.path preferences

Note: on Windows Systems this option is by default off (= autoscan on), because on Windows the registry is used to look up the paths, which takes a negligible amount of time.

 

NextWhat's New for previous versions