PropellerIDE

PropellerIDE is an easy-to-use, cross-platform development tool for the Parallax Propeller microcontroller.

Write Spin code, download programs to your Propeller board, and debug your applications with the built-in serial terminal.

• Download PropellerIDE

About

PropellerIDE is designed to be more than just a code editor; it is a toolkit for building custom Propeller development environments that can be tailored to specific applications. Written in C++ with Qt, PropellerIDE can be configured to support specific programming languages, toolchains, or features as first-class components that feel built-in and well-integrated to the customer, but are really standalone components.

Features

• Spin syntax highlighting, auto-complete, and auto-indent
• Unicode editing support
• Searchable project view
• Serial terminal, memory map,
• Deep integration with Propeller hardware
• Customizable theming
• Runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Raspberry Pi!
• Easy to deploy for custom applications using packthing

Project Roadmap

Immediate focus

• Improve overall code maintainability
• Refactor components for better separation of concerns
• Refactor widgets to use UI forms
• Auto-select newly attached serial devices

Long-term focus

• Multiple Propeller languages: Spin, C, PropBasic, xBasic, Forth,...
• Serial and wireless code download
• New platforms: Android, ChromeBook, HTML5, iOS

Requested features (short list)

• Alt-Drag to select text blocks
• Colorful serial console formatting
• Indent guides
• More Propeller documentation

Features to support LameStation

• Clean up compiler output and add directory support
• Integrated web help

Dependencies

• PropellerIDE requires at least Qt5.2.
• Windows packaging requires Inno Setup 5 with preprocessor support.
• Build and release tools require Python 2.7.
• You will need Git; on Windows, download Git Shell from GitHub.

Build Environment

Ubuntu

There is a bug in QSerialPortInfo that results in a memory leak in Qt5.2.1 on POSIX systems. You will need a minimum of Qt5.3 which is only available on Ubuntu as of 14.10.

Add the Utopic Unicorn sources to your /etc/apt/sources.list if you are on 14.04 or earlier.

deb http://cz.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu utopic main 

Run an update to ensure your apt repositories are up-to-date.

sudo apt-get update

Install the required dependencies.

sudo apt-get install git make g++ qt5-default libqt5serialport5 zlib1g-dev libudev-dev

PropellerIDE release versions are made in Travis CI, which runs on Ubuntu 12.04. See the .travis.yml in this project to see how to build for that version of Ubuntu.

Windows

PropellerIDE on Windows is built using the Qt5 MinGW distribution from Qt's website:

• https://www.qt.io/download/

C:\Qt\Tools\mingw482_32\bin;C:\Qt\5.3\mingw482_32\bin;C:\Program Files (x86)\Inno Setup 5

To build from the command line, and for release, use PowerShell. The make command on Windows is mingw32-make.exe. PropellerIDE has been built on Windows 7 and 8.

OS X

Install XCode through the App Store, then install the command-line tools through the terminal.

xcode-select --install

The Qt version used must match the XCode version. The easiest solution is to use the latest version of XCode and Qt.

Raspberry Pi - Raspbian Wheezy

Qt5 is not available in the standard repository, but you can obtain it from Debian backports.

Add the following entries to /etc/apt/sources.list.

deb http://twolife.be/raspbian/ wheezy main backports
deb-src http://twolife.be/raspbian/ wheezy main backports

Add the repository key.

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-key 2578B775

Update and install Qt5 and its dependencies.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install qt5-default qt5-qmake libegl1-mesa libgles2-mesa

Building

PropellerIDE can be built from the command-line using qmake or from QtCreator. Shadowed builds are not currently supported.

Note: QtCreator and command-line builds generate build files that are incompatible with each other, so you will need to call make distclean in the src/ directory before you can switch from one to the other.

First, checkout the project.

git clone https://github.com/lamestation/PropellerIDE.git PropellerIDE
cd PropellerIDE

Retrieve any dependencies.

git submodule update --init --recursive

Change to the source root and generate the makefiles.

cd src/
qmake -r

Then build the project.

make

Or on Windows,

mingw32-make

make clean to clean the project; make distclean to really clean it.

Packaging For Release

Whereas old versions of PropellerIDE used a custom makefile, the current software is built using packthing, which is a free multi-source packaging tool by LameStation. Follow the link to learn more.

Credits

Developed by LameStation LLC (contact@lamestation.com) in collaboration with Parallax Inc.

Originally developed by Steve Denson, Dennis Gately, and Roy Eltham.