embedXcode

embedXcode is a template for Xcode, Apple's official IDE on macOS, and eases development for the most popular embedded computing boards. 

​Development started in 2010 and embedXcode was shared in 2012 until 2020, with one year of long term support terminated late 2021.

The ideas behind embedXcode were to go beyond the rather limited Arduino IDE and explore the use of a professional IDE with all the modern amenities like code-completion, colour-syntaxing, code-folding, to name a few.

Thanks to its modular structure and use of standard tools, embedXcode supported 81 platforms with 234 boards and variants

embedXcode featured external debugging with OpenOCD and J-Link,  automatic documentation generation with Astyle and Doxygen, and compiled libraries generation. 

Leaving Apple for Linux

After almost a decade, embedXcode came to an end due to Apple: repeated hardware failures (with an MTBF of 4 months), disastrous customer service, never-ending mindless quest for breaking changes... All this resulted on a very high total cost of ownership (TCO of USD2,737 per year). 

The switch to Linux was surprisingly quick and easy.

• On the hardware side, I picked an Intel NUC. This compact and affordable PC comes with many USB ports, all the required documentation to install memory, SSD and HDD, and a standard three-year-long warranty period. Memory and SDD come from Crucial; display from Iiyama; and Bluetooth keyboard and mouse from Microsoft.
  

• On the software side, the Debian distribution with Gnome desktop supports all the applications I was using previously. I picked the excellent Visual Studio Code IDE with the C/C++, Cortex Debug, Astyle and Doxygen extensions. 

I continue to use the same tools, including Doxygen, Segger J-Link and Ozone, Saleae Logic.

Very few changes were required for the adaptation, thanks to the technologies embedXcode relies on. As a benefit, debugging is now internal.

In 2022

Today, I am using Visual Studio Code on Linux with the makefiles from embedXcode.

Thanks to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and the remote development extension, the same configuration also runs on Windows.

Other options

Today, the offer of advanced IDEs is large. Let's mention

• Visual Micro for Visual Studio on Windows,
• Visual Studio Code and the extension for Arduino,
  
• PlatformIO for Visual Studio Code, and
• the Arduino 2.0 IDE still in beta based on Eclipse Theia.

​Posted: 17 May 2021
Updated: 28 Sep 2021, 03 Jan 2022