mcBuilder - All Issues Thread

Thought I'd put together a spot to post questions specifically about mcBuilder

1. to start out with, as I mentioned, I don't think the debug system is getting loaded correctly

2. Can't figure out how to connect up using the USB console to my controller, doesn't seem to identify the connection . therefore i can't send commands or recieve either.

3. the builder shows errors that are generated in other areas of code that the user may not have modified. this may cause confusion as they are more related to branch code than core code. Supposedly the user only cares about what they are working on.

using windows XP and mcbuilder Alpha

This tool seems awesome and I hope to use it for a full-on project soon.

will post later with more thoughts.

Cool - please keep the comments coming! I have just barely finished putting this together, so any thoughts/suggestions/whatever are very welcome. 1. I'll check the debug system. Are you getting build errors when you try to make a call to Debug()? If not, what are you seeing? 2. For USB, make sure you've a) included the USB system via the info dialog and b) made a call to Usb_SetActive(1) in Run() in order to turn on the USB on the board. I do need to test the usb/serial code on Windows more. It's working reliably on OS X. 3. I think ideally the core code will build without errors to avoid this issue. This will be addressed in a forthcoming update of the firmware code.

Ah - since the Debug system relies on OSC, make sure you have OSC turned on in the project info dialog. A clean and build should sort you out.

sweet, i'll take a closer look when i get back from my business trip.

I believe I am having the same problem as Aaron with the USB.  It's not that the project I built is using USB and that is missing.  It's that when I open the USB Console, nothing shows up in the ports list so I can't use whatever features are available there (I would assume OSC commands and uploading firmware).

MC Helper works fine for me as far as recognizing the MC as COM6 and "Samba Board".

MCBuilder aslo seems to crash every few minutes on the laptop I am using (XP Pro SP2)  Here is the message in the Event Viewer:

Faulting application mcbuilder.exe, version 0.0.0.0, faulting module unknown, version 0.0.0.0, fault address 0x100011c5.

If I don't close the error message I can still edit the file I was working on and even build it.  I didn't realize this the first time it crashed so I lost some changes, but the next time I did find I could save the files and do a copy/paste into notepad just to make sure I had the code.  Let me know if you need any other info about the error.

I like the potential of this project, it will make it a lot easier for people to get into programming the MC without having to setup a larger IDE like Eclipse.

Roger that - I still haven't looked at the Windows USB Console stuff. It's using a slightly different USB library than mchelper, so it's conceivable that there would be a few things not quite in the right place I've never seen the intermittent crashing, though. Does that correspond to any kind of events that you could observe, or does it really just seem to happen every once in a while? Thanks for the report.

Hey,

I'm running Mac OS 10.5.3, using the upload helper for leopard with mcbuilder. Earlier, it was mentioned the Mac OS X version seemed to be working, however I copied and pasted the same code as the original "blinking" make.c file (and took out the network and OSC code lines). I've selected both OSC and USB boxes in the info window, yet after erasing the board, replugging and uploading the code via mcbuilder, there's no response (ie no blinking). Are there still bugs in this area or have I (not-surprisingly) missed something?

Thanks

It's always worth doing a clean after changing the project info - in fact, I'm going to make it so it does it automatically the next time you build after changing the project info. I've successfully uploaded binaries that blink LEDs at different rates via mcbuilder, so I'm not immediately sure what the issue might be. The code is actively being worked on at the moment, so it may simply be easiest to wait for another release (assuming you're not building it yourself).

I've gotten a chance to get back into the mcbuilder, but I can't get the USB console to work either, and with the same symptoms as above, so it must be a general issue

Also, if I activate the network system, I get a compile errors from WebServer_SetActive, and the build fails.

Using a Windows XP desktop PC

Yep - the USB Console has been fixed in SVN and is now working. The webserver is now a library, so if you include the webserver library, I think you should get that failure to go away. This is being reorganized for an impending firmware release.

Thanks Liam. While I was poking around with mcbuilder and mchelper-2.5 I noticed that it appears that the only Qt-4.4'ism is qplaintextedit. Is it possible to easily replace qplaintextedit with qtextedit or some other <=Qt-4.3 for greater compatibility? EBo --

I just tried to build mcbuilder and got: trunk> qmake -unix mcbuilder.pro WARNING: Failure to find: resources/icons/icons_rsrc.qrc /usr/bin/rcc: File does not exist 'resources/icons/icons_rsrc.qrc' There is no icons directory in the svn trunk subtree. There is a ./mchelper/branches/v25/resources/icons containing "mticon128.png network_icon.gif usb_1.jpg usb_icon.gif". Can I copy them over? Regardless the icons should be added to the mcbuilder subtree. Thanks Liam!

That doesn't seem right - the file is there in SVN: http://dev.makingthings.com/browser/mcbuilder/trunk/resources/icons Any chance there's a weird line ending issue or something like that? Thanks for building on Linux - I have yet to try that out!

I'll check it. BTW, the library is about to close so it might be a few days before I get this sorted out, but I create some convienience Makefile to manage checkouts and updates. Here is the one fore the Makeingthings SVN: ROOT=https://makingthings.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/makingthings all: co up : svn $@ ${ROOT} makingthings When I did an update they did not come over. I will have to check later. Gots to go!!!

It appears that there is some problem with the mchelper SVN tree. When I run the following command: > svn up https://makingthings.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/makingthings makingthings it freezez in the middle of the download. When I finally out I get the following error: svn: REPORT request failed on '/svnroot/makingthings/!svn/vcc/default' svn: REPORT of '/svnroot/makingthings/!svn/vcc/default': Could not read response body: Interrupted system call (https://makingthings.svn.sourceforge.net) make: *** [up] Error 1 When I rerun svn I get: Skipped 'https://makingthings.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/makingthings' then it stalls again. As far as I can tell, I am not getting the entire tree. Liam, is there some way you could email me a copy of the v25 branch? EBo -- ps: Sorry for disappearing -- my car died 975 miles from home and 13 miles from net access, but I finally made it back home...

Hmm - is this still the case? SourceForge has some trouble with their SVN services from time to time, but they seem to get fixed up before too long. If it's still giving you trouble, I can zip up a copy for you...

Thanks Liam. Yep, it is still a problem. I first noticed the hang some 3 weeks ago, and I just verified that it is still a problem... EBo --

Oh, and just to make sure, there are a couple of files in there that are quite large - the zips of the toolchains. Are you sure that it was frozen and that it wasn't just working on a large file?

I've just started a "svn update" and will let it run overnight if I can. At the moment I've got access to a decent connection, so should be able to download something overnight. catch you tomorrow...

DOH! ummm... well.... that worked. Sorry for bumping the the stupid button. It did come across, but took awhile. Apparently there is something along the lines of 160MB of ziped files in mcbuilder/*/resources/tools. The connection at the public library I was working from was rather slow and did not complete even the first file before it was time to close... Thanks for your patience and help. EBo --

Cool - yeah, those are a bit hefty for sure. I'm getting pretty close to pushing another release out, so I'll be interested to hear of anything you find.

Okems... later tonight I'll see if I can bang on it again.

I just got back into using mcbuilder, and I'm now having problems with the xbee system. Everything else works fine, servo, digitalout, analogin etc.

All of my lines containing Xbee commands (getpacket and stuff) generate errors.

Any ideas?

What kind of errors? Files not found, or actual compilation kinda stuff?

it doesn't recognize the functions, like as if the library weren't loading correctly. It gets included fine, but wherever I make a command I get a compile error.

Confirmed - will fix it right up.

Hi!

I started using mcbuilder and ran into some problems that might have been resolved already but I'm not sure.

When I try to compile an unmodified Heavy 1.5 firmware with mcbuilder 0.2 on windows xp sp2:

line52: WebServerOsc_ReceiveMessage undeclared

When I comment out line 52 and recompile I get:

Undefined reference to the Xbee as mentionned in a parent post

After commenting out the Xbee lines, the project compiles fine. Uploads fine.

But then the board cannot be found via OSC (usb and udp).

Also when trying to compile the Solo firmware, I get:

arm-elf-gcc: no input files (Build failed)

Maybe a newbie error on my part? I don't get it.

The first problem was an issue with libraries - this has been resolved in SVN, but thanks for the report. Not sure off the top of my head might cause the Solo build to fail, but I'll load it in there and see what's what. I'm hoping to have another mcbuilder rev out in a day or two so I should be able to make sure it works for that.

Thanks!

The Solo bug I tried to reproduce from scratch, but now I get a different error message:

Error in network.c and network.o: Undefined reference to WebServer_SetActive

and also: collect2: ld returned 1 exit status