So we made a decision to buy the dev kit, but then what? ( mac)

[FormerMember]

I am spending the last 3 days trying to make sure somebody on this plant made it using a mac. Write a simple program and flash it to the DK. (before we make our own pcb)

I was able to find multiple questions about mac, without a single clear answer how exactly you do that. I find only promotions to this Segger software (that looks like something from 1980)

There was 1 guy who made it using command line, and his way seems like hell.

Do you have an official guide to somebody who pay for your product using a mac ?

1. Where do I write my code? the actual code that I can compile for the chip ? can I use Xcode?
2. I have the DK board, how do I flash it ?

Nordic, there are tens of millions mac users in this world, they really want to use your chip, but I found that all of them chose to give up because there is no clear way to do that.

[FormerMember]

Is there a SES guide that show in simple steps how to output high on a certain pin and flash it ? most of the guides just use a common hex.

[awneil]

Xcode is GCC isn't it?

GCC = GNU Compiler Collection - there are many different GCC compilers.

The GCC compiler required for creating embedded ARM Cortex-M code is not the same as the GCC compiler that creates native code for iOS.

launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded

[RK]

no they all didn't give up. I've been programming Nordic and other embedded stuff on a mac for the last 4 years and I wouldn't use one of the old trashy windows embedded IDEs if you paid me. You think SES looks like something from the 80s? Go look at Keil which is something from the 60s and which many companies support as the only solution for programming. Nordic at least supports gcc, and all their recent python-based tools are cross platform.

I use Crossworks, which is the product Rowley whiteboxed for Segger. I love it, for embedded development it does exactly what you need and it supports just about every device I've bought so far. And I think when they did the SES port they made it even nicer and cleaner.

Once you've done some embedded programming with Nordic and then looked at the offerings from other companies, you'll find Nordic is way ahead of the curve.

[RK]

Xcode is clang these days, not GCC. And you can blame Apple for the fact it's now not possible to use it for embedded development and other languages easily. They used to support plugins, proper documented support, so people could extend it, that all disappeared around Xcode 3 when it became their closed product. People do add things for cross compilation, but they are hacks, they require reverse-engineering the Xcode support bundles and they break every time there's a new release of Xcode.

It is a shame because it is quite a nice IDE and the toolchains are a separate part of it, but Apple stopped supporting 3rd party toolchains and so we don't get to use it.