Eclipse plug-in for WSN

Spring last year (2006) I was given the job to make an Eclipse-based IDE to program, download and debug Wireless Sensor Network nodes. At that time, I didn't know very well what Eclipse was. Well, to be fair, I had used it several times before, and I was starting to use it for my research for other things (a middleware monitor, which I will talk about in some other occasion). Anyway, I had certainly no idea about the Eclipse plug-in system. You see, the whole Eclise IDE is based on plug-ins that use and create extension points. With this extension points, you can do things such as adding an icon to the tool bar, creating a new code editor or just adding a new view with pretty much whatever you like.
Back then, other people have already done similar things. However, since we were (and are) building our own platform, prof. Kim felt that we had to have our own programming software to complement the kit (and, anyway, is not that the guys at ETRI were going to borrow us the Java code). The most interesting of all is that our laboratory did participate in 2004 in building this other platform. But anyway, that's another story. Nevertheless, it seems that prof. Kim also felt that I was the best option for coding the new IDE and make it look "good".
Summer past and I really didn't do much. I was into my research, and although I read some documentation to understand how the plug-in system works, I didn't really code anything. Eventually, pressure from some exhibition and others (such as prof. Kim :) made me take it seriously, and in less than one month and built a prototype that could do just that (well, more or less): program in C (CDT plug-in) and compile (winavr), download to the target board (avarice) and debug using a JTAG-ICE (also avarice and gdb). It looked (and still pretty much looks) like this:



It was quite tricky to get some of the functionality, and even now, the IDE is basically a prototype which just works with one kind of micro-controller and only downloads with a JTAG-ICE. I think I should mention that I was not free to do whatever I liked with the OS source (the WSN operating system that we are also developing), and whatever I did to the source tree, it had to be compatible with the "old" way of coding (namely, make a source file and use the command line to compile/upload the image to the sensor board) After the initial version, I tried to make some improvements. The first concern was that the current module selection system was based on a specific version of the OS. This is bad, because new boards and new chips bring the need for new drivers and the like. Also improvements on old modules need sometimes to be offered as a choice (eg. for testing). So my solution was to build a XML file for each main board and sensor board that we developed, specifying the name of the module and where the drivers in the source tree are located. Then, in the "new project" wizard, a user could choose first the main board, which will open the choice of associated sensor boards and so on. Unfortunately, although I began coding this, I had other more urgent things to do and finally I never completed it. Now it seems that a new post-Doc student will take care of my "creation". I hope he can understand my coding :)