How to set up GCC and Eclipse for development on the beacon kit

[wim]

Hi,

I am looking to select a bluetooth chip for a new project, one of the criteria is access to free development tools. I see that in the SDK GCC is supported. But: how do I set this up? Is there some guidelines or user manual? And what is this soft device? Is there a step by step tutorial or something to get started? I would like to start off from the beacon example, and from there on add things, like communication to an SPI device from the microcontroller.

Any help is very welcome, find it very difficult to find an entry point...

[Nguyen Hoan Hoang]

This blog post here is full Eclipse GCC on OS X. Contains example project created with Eclipse also include iOS source code for each examples. Current Eclipse is Mars. Luna is not recommended. http://embeddedsoftdev.blogspot.ca/p/ehal-nrf51.html

[wim]

Hi Nguyen, Your blog has given me a lot of insight so far. Have installed all the plugins, tool chain, and did all the recommended settings as from the GNU ARM Eclipse website.

I now try to build the EHAL and CMSIS library projects first. When trying to build the CMSIS project, I get 2 warnins on include paths that are not found, although they are there, and I put them in the right place - as the nrf51_sdk directory name is not the original name but I had to rename it, could that be the reason? Following paths were not found: Invalid project path: Include path not found (CMSIS/CMSIS/include) Invalid project path: Include path not found (nrf51_sdk/components/drivers_nrf/hal)

Or is this error due to the way I imported the project? I have done the import by doing Import>General>Existing projects into workspace> then chose the indicated workspace directory as root directory, and selected all the projects it found. Was that the right way ?

But apparently the library was built ok, only warnings.

However, when building the EHAL project, I do get an error on a file not found: nrf51.h. This file resides in the nrf51_sdk/components/drivers_nrf/hal directory, so here, the warning causes an error.

Furthermore, I do not have the sub directories -- nrf51422 and -- nrf51822 in the SDK I downloaded from then nordic website (SDK version 7). Do I need them? And then, I am not sure how I can port your projects to the Beacon kit hardware just yet, can you point me where to start?