Today I started investigating how to program the STM32F0DISCOVERY development board.
While I do have ATOLLIC True Studio Lite installed on my dev machine (Windows XP), I want to get to the point where I can develop on this board using only FOSS software without the limitations present in the trial versions of commercial development tools. (For instance, True Studio Lite imposes a code size limitation on Cortex-M0 parts, and disables the use of C++.)
I followed the tutorial presented here by Dr. Hussam Al-Hertani. Dr. Hertani's tutorials lead his visitors through installing ARM-GCC and Eclipse and compiling projects using a makefile. While this tutorial does work, I don't like the idea of manually managing my makefile, and I don't like the fact that his tutorial doesn't include steps to make the GUI aware of include files and paths, which causes the GUI to flag numerous errors that aren't really errors because the makefile-driven build process knows more about the build than the GUI does.
I was able to create a new project from scratch and get .c files to compile. I'm having difficulty getting the startup_stm32f0xx.s file to assemble. Apparently the GCC assembler doesn't handle the C-style comments in the .s file; to get these files to compile it appears that the GCC preprocessor must run first. I'm tweaking the command for the assembler in the toolchain to try to resolve this.
My goal is to have Eclipse automatically manage the build process so that I don't have to manage my own makefile, and be able to leverage the code analysis tools in the GUI. Ultimately I want to build a toolchain that relies only on free, open source software. Dr. Hertani's tutorials have provided an excellent starting point and I hope to be able to write STM32 code, have it compile, and download my code to the board soon.
I do recommend Dr. Hertani's tutorials. They're well written and they work. (His tutorials are based on an older version of Eclipse, but the changes between his tutorial and the current version are minimal.)