Best IDE for Freescale Kinetis cortex-M controllers

[VIGNESH BALAJI]

Hi,
    I want to know which IDE is best for kinetis Cortex-M controllers based on your experience?

[ElektroQuark]

Best free IDEs for Kinetis:

- KDS (Kinetis Design Studio)
- EmBitz

[nctnico]

Eclipse. Codewarrior is also based on Eclipse so if you download this: https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuarmeclipse/ you get Codewarrior for free without the parts Freescale messed up.

[ThomasDK]

Don't know if it has gotten better, but when I tried KDS a year ago it was a steaming pile of crap. 

Freescale really messed it up.

Would go for Codewarrier if I had to use a Kinetis MCU again.

Thomas

[VIGNESH BALAJI]

Why KDS is superior than other four any reasons???

[Morgoroth]

Probably because kinetic expert, you can set all features of the chip very fast, and is eclipse based, so is stable.

I started to use KDS last year and seems to be very stable, but, freescale (nxp now) seems to use clients as QA on updates.

[BloodyCactus]

But I thought Freescale didnt make kds, KDS is from Somnium? http://www.somniumtech.com

SOMNIUM created Kinetis Design Studio for NXP, and offer DRT as the natural upgrade from KDS's entry level tools and for Kinetis developers migrating from NXP's legacy CodeWarrior tools.

So dont blame freescale for messing up kds

[dannyf]

kinetic expert

Agreed. PE is superbly done. It puts Harmoney or Cube or ASF to shame.

[parasbhanot]

For me IAR is the best IDE for ARM cortex controllers. It has the best debugger . Atollic is also very good IDE . The latest version of attolic  has removed 32k limit but it has  limited debugging support.

[VIGNESH BALAJI]

Instead of Using KDS,Atollic or Somnium Can we use Eclipse it.Since All others are based on Eclipse Except IAR and Keil?
Is Using Eclipse with GNU ARM toolchains a better choice?

[dohara]

SOMNIUM produced KDS2 & 3.0 for Freescale, integration of GNU, Eclipse and Freescale support (such as PEx). Its widely used and is being successfully used by a huge number of developers. If you do have KDS problems or support queries check out the NXP (nee Freescale) forum and the community will be there to help out.

It might also be worth noting that Atollic's tools use very old versions of GNU and Eclipse tools which are up to 2 years older than KDS!

SOMNIUM DRT is recommended by Freescale as the natural upgrade from other tools including KDS and CodeWarrior. It provides significantly better code generation than pure GNU and unlike IAR its compatible with all Freescale middleware (including Sensor Fusion which isn't supported for IAR tools).

DRT also supports automatic KDS and CW import, and offers advanced debug features including trace (which CW had but KDS doesn't).

You can get a free trial of DRT from https://portal.somniumtech.com/products.html

 

[ElektroQuark]

New Kinetis micros will not have PEx support. It looks like Kinetis SDK is the new approach.

[Sal Ammoniac]

Don't know if it has gotten better, but when I tried KDS a year ago it was a steaming pile of crap. 

Freescale really messed it up.

Hmmmm... I tried KDS for the first time this weekend and was pleasantly surprised. I've been a staunch Eclipse basher over the years based on its dismal performance in all of the incarnations I've tried (Atollic, LPCXpresso, and a few others), but trying KDS really convinced me that an Eclipse-based embedded IDE doesn't have to be a dog performance-wise. KDS is just as fast as my gold standard for IDE performance -- Rowley Crossworks.

I used it extensively over the last three days porting my RTOS to the Kinetis K64 and didn't notice a single thing that ticked me off. This is rare for an IDE--I almost always find something quickly that annoys the hell out of me.

I give KDS 3.1