electronics software for linux

[djsb]

For PIC32 development, you can get an open source Unison linux target environment:

http://www.rowebots.com/embedded_processors_supported/microchip_pic32

There are several PIC IDE's available for Linus in general:

Just to clarify Unison is an embedded OS for the PIC32 unless I'm mistaken. It runs ON a PIC32.

David.

[shebu18]

Something i found about AVR's, eclipse and linux.
http://www.avrfreaks.net/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=65879

[Christopher]

I work for a small company that makes custom Linux distributions as a day job (For embedded things like musical keyboards, mostly (expensive) sound equipment).

We base distros on Debian or Ubuntu (Tend to go with Debain these days), and find it highly effective for desktop environments. For our servers (Build etc) we use Debian because that's what we know the best...

[BBQdChips]

There is a PIC-Basic compiler, or at least there used to be.  It wasn't a Microchip product, and it was expensive as Cadillac cars.  But, if you look around a bit, you might be able to find that.  If I recall, I think it was in the neighborhood of $1000USD, but it may have been less.  I know it was a lot.  I never bought it and at that time, the C compilers were a fortune also.  They had no free versions.

C is actually quite easy.  It's not as forgiving as Basic, but, I'm not sure forgiving is a good thing.  Any language is going to have some traps for a beginner vs something they already know. But C is really quite simple if you are only doing simple things.  Get a nice little Hello World, or Hello Blinking Led program going,  and from there you see how easy it is.  C compilers are free, so you can afford a little time spent learning. 

MPLabX is a bit slow. Nothing like the old MPLab used to be.  The added functionality though is worth the wait if you ask me.  If all you want to do is program chips, they have other utilities for that anyway. I've been using MplabX on linux since Beta 2 or 3.  Though at that point, I did a lot of things on windows in the old system.

I recall reading somewhere here too that a person has DipTrace running under Wine on Linux.  There's another package you should install, and get familiar with doing some custom configs so programs work like you remember them on Windoze.   Seems I also remember a person having LTSpice running on Ubuntu under Wine too.  You should be able to get a pretty complete system going if you spend a little time at it.

[free_electron]

Free Basic language compilers for PIC / AVR and others : Free as in code limited if you don't pay for the licence, but with some you can make fairly large projects.

Oshonsoft
Swordfish Basic
MikroE Basic ( up to 5K compiled code for free.)  AVR / PIC / 8051 / ARM / PIC32 and others
Bascom AVR / 8051

Fortunately they all run on windows so no mucking around with that elitist loonix stuff that still thinks command lines are state-of-the-art ...
The best linux plug-in would be a VM running windows :p. That way you don't have to choose. you can run software from both worlds. Why limit yourself ?

[T4P]

MPLabX is a bit slow. Nothing like the old MPLab used to be.  The added functionality though is worth the wait if you ask me.  If all you want to do is program chips, they have other utilities for that anyway. I've been using MplabX on linux since Beta 2 or 3.  Though at that point, I did a lot of things on windows in the old system.

Heck yes . MPLAB X is a hell lot slower even on my Phenom 4C 3.2GHz computer , i switched back to the MPLAB 8 for my review :
http://www.element14.com/community/roadTestReviews/1225

[BBQdChips]

@Dave.S

it was around Beta 4 or 5 that I ported that kit over to Linux, and did what I think was the first demos not on windoze.  It actually worked quite nice, and I was impressed with how smoothly it worked throughout the os.  It's actually pretty cool how under linux, you can redirect things to act upon I/O from that USB device much more easily than you can in windows.  Such as, linking a pseudo serial port to it and using any-ole comms program to talk with it. 

But yea, MPlab8 is 10x faster in compile / upload operations than MplabX.  It doesn't affect me quite so much cause my projects are not that large.  But, I've talked to people doing work on projects that take 3-5 minutes to compile and upload, and that's just unacceptable.  And, ultimately, it's up to Oracle to fix the thing cause Microchip has their hands tied.  They can only fix their own code so much, then it's up to the platform to pick up the slack.  And, there is a lot of picking up to be done on Oracle's part. 

Sorta analogous to using C or Basic.  The best basic programmer in the world is a big performance hole to the guy using C or assembly.

Interesting thing about C for the Pic. A few small demos have been done where people have shown a disassembly listing of C to have not a single extra instruction vs writing the code in assembly.  Of course thats not always the case, but, there isn't often much to be gained by doing inline assembly.

[T4P]

but something's weird ... Netbeans ( based on the same eclipse ) is much faster then MPLAB X ...
It's either Oracle or Eclipse or Microchip ...

[BBQdChips]

Anytime they build on top of a pre-made IDE, there's a huge performance hit.  The thing just does way too much and was written with the "include the kitchen sink" mentality.  That would be fine if all the code was real tight, but it's not.  As for Oracle, I won't get started on them

Another great program for Linux or Windoze is:  http://joshmadison.com/convert-for-windows/  Take note at the bottom of the page, if you're running linux, you probably need to set the options for the tab bar to be a single line w/scroll bar.  If you don't have this on your system, you shoud get it.