Sourcery CodeBench for ARM worth buying?

[Harvs]

Gday all,

So I'm just kicking off in ARM development (STM32 M0 and M4F disco boards are in the mail.)

So it seems you can download the lite G++ from Sourcery and do an install with Eclipse IDE.

But then Sourcery are offering their Eclipse based IDE in a personal edition for $200, which isn't bad for an IDE.

However I'm stuck to find out what this really gives you over following one of the install guides and doing a free install.  

Is it worth the $200?

Any experiences would be great.
Cheers

[andersm]

If you're just starting out, definitely not.

[TheDirty]

If you are only using it for personal use and want the convenience of not having to deal with GCC+Eclipse+OpenOCD yourself, I would suggest a personal (non-commercial) license to Rowley Crossworks.  It supports a crapload of different JTAG/SWD programmers and just about every ARM variant there is.  It's $150.

Otherwise try to get a Eclipse+GCC+OpenOCD toolchain going.

[alm]

Or try one of the crippled (code size limited) GCC + Eclipse packages that support the STM32, like Atollic Truestudio.

[PuterGeek]

Another free possibility is CooCox http://www.embest-tech.com/coocox/ with GNU Tools for ARM Embedded Processors https://launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded/

CooCox was bought in 2011 by Embest, a Farnell company. The GNU Tools are affiliated with Linaro and partially sponsored by ARM.

Beyond the price, CooCox is a true embedded IDE based on Eclipse. I'm not sure how well the Eclipse plug-ins work but it may be worth a try.

[mrflibble]

If you're on windoze you could try Atollic truestudio, the lite (free) version. That gets you going pretty quick. Once you are comfy with how things operate, you can 1) stick with it or 2) jump ship and do an eclipse based toolchain. Incidentally, atollic is also eclipse based, so things will look pretty much the same. Translation: no need to relearn the IDE.

Same applies if you're dual booting windoze/linux. The reason I suggest doing Atollic first, is that it's always nice to have a dev board + tools that "just works" when you get your board in the mail.

And to answer your original qeustion: No, IMO it's not worth $200 when you're just starting out.

[Harvs]

Thanks for the help guys, I'll give the free versions of the comerical tools a go first (atollic sounds good as I already know eclipse pretty well).

I'm just getting started on ARM, however have been programming uCs for 10 odd yrs off and on.

I've never been much of one for cobbling together tool chains though.  I would much rather spend $150 on a tool chain for personal use, and not waste the time I have for personal projects attempting to cobble something together. 

I'd just rather be spending my time writing code and building hardware.

Cheers

[TheDirty]

I've never been much of one for cobbling together tool chains though.  I would much rather spend $150 on a tool chain for personal use, and not waste the time I have for personal projects attempting to cobble something together. 

I'd just rather be spending my time writing code and building hardware.

This was definitely my thought when I bought a personal license for Crossworks ARM, but I started out with ARM7 about 4 years ago and the GCC/Eclipse/OpenOCD toolchain was really primitive back then.  Wasted a lot of time trying to get them to work and OpenOCD had a real problem with 64bit Windoze at the time.  I gave up and bought the License to Crossworks and I haven't touched a linker script since.  I'm happy with the money I spent and any new ARM variant I want to play with, STM32, LPC, Stellaris, ... I just need to use the built in package manager to download the support package for that architecture.  Of course spending any money like that, you have to be pretty sure you are going to use it enough to make it worth it, but with the amount that ARM cores seem to be taking over I don't see any problem with that as long as you stay doing hobby electronics.

[Kremmen]

The problem seems to be that all of the toolchain vendors are real jealous of anyone making a buck using their products. So the reasonably priced licenses are strictly personal use only and that just is no good.
CooCox CoIDE looks promising but even there compiling C++ is an issue. I have managed to make the tweaks to compile C++ projects successfully at least for some chips but it is early days yet. You do need to do some low level file editing, but at least it is quite mechanical and repeatable, and you only do it once for a project. Not perfect but if it works, good enough for me. Beats kilobuck commercial offerings hands down.

[Harvs]

The problem seems to be that all of the toolchain vendors are real jealous of anyone making a buck using their products. So the reasonably priced licenses are strictly personal use only and that just is no good.
CooCox CoIDE looks promising but even there compiling C++ is an issue. I have managed to make the tweaks to compile C++ projects successfully at least for some chips but it is early days yet. You do need to do some low level file editing, but at least it is quite mechanical and repeatable, and you only do it once for a project. Not perfect but if it works, good enough for me. Beats kilobuck commercial offerings hands down.

Whilst I'm yet to actually try it, Sourcery Codebench's personal licence doesn't have restrictions on making a $ by using it.  At least that I can see.  It's normally $400, but when I registered they gave me a link to get it for $200, so I'd suggest that price probably isn't a one off thing.

I've been trying Rowley's offering.  Not a bad setup, a bit dated, but the licencing restrictions on the personal version are a killer.  Atollic have similar very restrictive licences.

[McMonster]

Atollic used to license previous versions of TrueStudio so that the ONLY limitation was that the documentation to the project had to include a notice about the IDE used. Too bad they changed this.