Development with GCC and Eclipse

[Jan Lundskov]

Hi Vidar, I am planning to start devlopment on the nRF52 and I would like to use GCC ARM with Eclipse. After having read your post "Development with GCC and Eclipse" and seeing all the comments regarding errors/issues etc. I don't feel very comfortable starting this process.

Now that you have developed these nice nRF51/52 IC's with softdevices etc, then it makes no sense that it should be so complicated to start writing code in an IDE.

Is there any chance that you will write a post describing how to make Eclipse Managed projects instead? Or somehow make the process of getting the GCC/Eclipse system up and running more simple.

Thanks in advance.

[endnode]

Ahoj Jene, I've personally never followed any Nordic example on GCC + Eclipse but I was setting it manually several times and I wouldn't describe it as difficult or complicated. Although I'm using cygwin for compilation and I don't use debugger (it's arguable if it is usable at all with systems running some "real time" scheduled operation such as BLE stack with adv. or con. intervals). What do you exactly expect? To have one installation binary which will install everything and you will just press some button to compile/load/debug? Then use Keil, it works almost like that with their MDK... (I guess Keil and Eclipse are running competition who will develop worse IDE but that's another discussion;).

Cheers Jan

[Vidar Berg]

Hi Jan, agree that the number of comments does not look very promising, but it's hopefully largely due to the fact that the post is quite popular. My advise is to make sure to follow the instructions closely, and start to simple by importing one of the attached examples. Previous experience with GCC and Makefiles is also beneficial.

In my experience it's not any easier or harder to create an Eclipse managed project, but you won't be using the existing Makefiles included in the SDK. To make this process more simple I think the only option is that we would have a pre-configured Eclipse setup that we could distribute, but at this is not something we have at the moment.

With that being said, if you want an IDE that works "out of the box", Keil is the way to go as @endnode mentioned.

[Michael Dietz]

devzone.nordicsemi.com/.../

Take a look at the above link. This IDE is much easier to use and set up than eclipse and has much better debugging. It uses the GCC compiler and is free with no limitations for evaluation. It works on Windows, mac osx, linux

[Michael Dietz]

please comment on the blog post if you like this IDE, we are collecting feedback

[Jan Lundskov]

Thanks for the link. It looks very interesting from my perspective, since I haven't worked with command lines, makefiles etc. I will take a look at the Segger Embedded Studio IDE and try to run some examples.