Targetting another microcontroller

[Danjovic]

Is it possible to target the compilation to another family of microcontroller rather than AVR?

Did anybody have a clue what do I have to change in Arduino IDE in order to generate code to a 68HC08 ?

Best Regards, 

[graynomad]

I believe there are moves afoot to make it easier to support other processors. What will be involved I don't know but one thing's for sure is that the libraries will have to be ported across.

As you're probably the only person using the 68HC08 that job will fall to you

______
Rob

[retrolefty]

Is it possible to target the compilation to another family of microcontroller rather than AVR?

Did anybody have a clue what do I have to change in Arduino IDE in order to generate code to a 68HC08 ?

Best Regards, 

Well actually it not the IDE that would require the most changes, but rather the whole tool chain included in the arduino IDE distribution, which are not even developed by the arduino team. So you would need a 6HC08 compatible C/C++ compilier, linker, and libraries as those are AVR processor specific. Also a new uploading program would have to be found or created as AVRDUDE is AVR processor specific.

In the bigger world of microcontroller in general the arduino IDE is not consider all that powerful and useful an IDE compared to other open source and commercial offering, some of which might already support the 6HC08.
What your asking for would take a very large effort with little advantage over other solutions I bet.

I suspect your best path is to seek out a microprocessor forum that deals with the 6HC08 processors and find out what they use in the way of an IDE and other needed tools.

Lefty

[Danjovic]

I know that Arduino IDE has several restrictions (no debug, etc) but people already get used to it.
That's why I was wondering about providing a different platform with other micropocessor, not to be a replacement, but as a complement. It's kinda like a proof of concept. 
I'd already expected to have to port the libraries and to adjust the makefiles in order to use the AN2295 serial bootloader, but I am not sure if SDCC could be used as a direct replacement of winavr toolchain.

Either way, thank you people for the answers.

[obiwanjacobi]

68HC08!? I used to work with those back in the 90-ties. We programmed in assembly and had a huge hardware board that could step-simulate (debugging) the MCU, which you could plug into your project hardware.

I do think the lack of debugging support with the Arduino is a pain. If I wasn't doing a 'real-time' project I would have moved to the Netduino and used the .NET Microframework (still thinking of a project I can use that on ).

And I'm not using the Arduino IDE anymore. I use Visual Micro that runs in Visual Studio 2010 Prof.