pic32 projects in visual studio 2010

Question

Has anyone managed to configure VS2010 to build and debug embedded projects on PIC32 microcontrollers? Are there any tutorials out there?

Using WinGDB i can connect to a gdb server to step through code from within vs2010 (have tested this compiling and debugging to a linux target).

The microchip dev tools appear to be based on a modified copy of gcc, with gdb missing, but there are third party mips compiler toolchains available with gdb. I understand that microchips debugging interface is proprietary, and unusable in this setting, but PIC32 supports JTAG debugging, and i have an amontec jtagkey 2 which is supported in openocd.

My current idea of an approach is:

• build on mips gcc under windows
• program chip with Pickit3 commandline tool
• use openocd to provide a gdb server for target device
• connect to gdb server from visual studio 2010 using winGDB

Inman

Answer 1

Sounds like a pretty good place to start.

You might want to look into MSBUILD for stringing together some of the different command line stuff. You should be able to use it to direct messages back into VS so you're getting info in places like the Errors and Warnings panel.

Another thing to look into would be Visual Studio Extensibility SDK for Visual Studio. If there is stuff that you can't do with the command line or MSBUILD, then you see about using VSX for it.

Lesson