Free alternative to MPLAB (PIC development)

Question

I started using MPLAB recently, but for someone that works with Eclipse and VS the IDE it's very limited. Do you know any free IDE or how to configure Ecplise or Netbeans to PIC development?

Thanks all

Answer 1

The underlying toolchain (compiler/linker etc.) can be used from any environment including Eclipse and Visual Studio, though Eclipse is probably the more flexible in this respect.

MPLAB has a feature to export a project as a makefile that can be used with GNU make, although you may rather generate your own makefile, or use the project management provided by Eclipse. In Visual Studio, create a Makefile Project, despite its name, you can specify any build command line, so invoke a batch file or makefile as necessary. Eclipse can use makefile projects also.

In Visual Studio, add all your project and compiler Include paths to teh project manually to get all the Intellisense navigation features to work.

Answer 2

There is a version of MPLAB X that is based on Netbeans.

Answer 3

Do you know any free IDE or how to configure Ecplise or Netbeans to PIC development?

No, but I'd write a US$100 check of my own money in a heartbeat, if Eclipse were available for PICs. The poor quality of MPLAB has been my one and only reason why I don't use Microchip processors anymore. TI's Code Composer is Eclipse-based and it is hugely easier to use and much more reliable than MPLAB.

You could run Eclipse CDT and presumably configure it to use the Microchip compiler (caveat: I've never done this myself). But you wouldn't get any debugging capability, which is 90%+ of the value of an IDE.

Answer 4

Some Options:

Piklab (this is a fork of pikdev and better IMO, has a windows version)

Pikdev

You'll probably need gputils which is a set of open source PIC utilities for various things and integrate into the above IDEs.

There is also PIC C builder for Eclipse that would let you build with the C30 compiler, don't think it supports C18 but maybe.

Answer 5

You should definitely switch to MPLAB X. Be warned though that it is a beta release.

Nonetheless it promises to rid us of both windows and the very buggy MPLAB 8.x (I'm not sure about the latter, though). It is a welcome step. I was sifting through their "Getting Started With MPLAB X" slides a little while earlier. In one of the slide it says that they chose NetBeans based IDE over an Eclipse based one because "NetBeans is acknowledged by many as being: More advanced, Less bloated, Faster and More intuitive". I have worked with both of these and I think Eclipse is far superior in about every arena.