Hi,
You can convert your project to a stand-alone project to copy all shared files to the project directory. Alternatively you can remove the startup file from the device-specific files and add a local copy instead. VisualGDB project system is quite resilient and will not be broken by changes like that. The original startup file will be re-inserted into the project only if you change the MCU type (or MCU properties) via VisualGDB Project Properties forcing it to regenerate the settings files.
The gcc_Debug.h file contains macros that are defined by GCC itself (e.g. GCC version) and the macros specified via command line. The STM32F10X_MD_FL macro defines the current MCU family and comes from the stm32.mak file the stm32.mak file is generated from data in %LOCALAPPDATA%\VisualGDB\EmbeddedBSPs\arm-eabi\com.sysprogs.arm.stm32\BSP.XML and contains the basic settings expected by the STM32 code. When you change the current MCU type, VisualGDB will recompute the flags necessary to build the code for it and will regenerate stm32.mak. If you want to add your own preprocessor macros (e.g. controlling the clock settings), use the VisualGDB Project Properties dialog (Makefile Settings page) that will save them to the debug.mak file instead.
The source control integration should work transparently as long as your check in the .vgdbsettings files from your project directory. You can reference your external libraries using relative paths on the Makefile Settings page and check in them as well.
Setting up a different compiler like IAR would be a bit more complicated. VisualGDB uses the GNU Make tool to build the projects. The GNU Make reads the rules from Makefile and files included from it and uses them to determine which files are outdated and what commands are used to rebuild them. In order to use IAR you will need to replace the Make rules that invoke GCC with Make rules that invoke IAR. This will involve changing the GCC-specific command-line arguments to IAR-specific command-line arguments and updating regular expressions that VisualGDB uses to parse error messages.
The interrupt handlers are supported via the GCC “weak reference” mechanism. The shared startup_stm32xxx.c file contains definitions like this:
void NMI_Handler() __attribute__ ((weak, alias ("Default_Handler")));
Then it builds the interrupt vector table that is placed to the specified location in FLASH:
void * g_pfnVectors[0x6b] __attribute__ ((section (".isr_vector"))) =
{
&_estack,
&Reset_Handler,
&NMI_Handler,
If your project defines another implementation of NMI_Handler, the linker will replace the default “weak alias” with it and the interrupt vector table will point to it instead. Hence there is no need to modify the shared startup_stm32fxxx.c file – simply ensure that each project provides its own replacement of all necessary handlers.
If you want to have several different projects using different modifications of the startup file, simply modify it this way:
#ifdef USING_BOARD_1 //Code specific to board 1 #elif defined(USING_BOARD_2) //Code specific to board 2 #else #error Board not defined #endif
Then define USING_BOARD_1 or USING_BOARD_2 on the Makefile Settings page of your project settings. As different projects will have different macros defined, the same shared startup file will work differently for each of the projects.