MPLab Xpress IDE LogoI loved the promise of MPLAB Xpress that someday I can do all my PIC development in the cloud. Even in today's limited form, as long as I stay within certain boundaries I was able to work on PIC programming on a Raspberry Pi! But one downside of keeping the project sources up on Microchip's servers is that they don't currently offer any kind of source code version control. I understand why they might not prioritize it for the hobbyist crowd getting started in PIC programming, but version control is something I've grown used to having in my software development toolbox. And I occasionally miss being able to review and rewind certain things, even in the relatively simple beginner's PIC projects that I've worked on to date.

MPLAB X logoSo after I inadvertently damaged my MPLAB Xpress Evaluation Board, I decided to graduate to using PIC chips directly without an evaluation board. This meant programming the chip using a PICkit 3 instead of the USB storage-based programmer on the evaluation board. And lastly - it also means leaving the web browser-based MPLAB Xpress and moving over to the NetBeans-based MPLAB X IDE installed and executed locally. One result is that the project files are now on my computer, which means I can bring git into the picture!

Obviously git can handle the C source files that I will be working with. What's less obvious are the other data files in a MPLAB X project. What is worth tracking in version control, and what are easily regenerated as needed? Such information are usually described in a .gitignore file, but Github's .gitignore collection does not include one for working in MPLAB X.

Fortunately, the MPLAB community has assembled one and it looks OK to me at first glance. I first dipped my toes using a project that was already complete, pushing it up to Github for archiving the sources. It also allowed me to test that all critical information is preserved, by deleting the directory and "git clone" anew to verify MPLAB X is happy with everything and didn't complain about files missing from the project.

The second trial run incorporated git from the start, tracking changes along the way so I could see what was boilerplate generated by the tools and separate them from the (quite trivial) code I actually wrote. This test is also successful.

And now, trial run number three: take all the 7-segment LED control code I've been working on in MPLAB Xpress and translating them into a MPLAB X project in a way that tracks all the individual tasks along the way.