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

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

Nguyen Hoan Hoang — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 19:56:00 GMT

Great hope you have fun with it. All the BLE example I put on comes with an iOS counterpart to allow you to see 1 to 1 relationship. Enjoy.

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

wim — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 19:44:47 GMT

I think I got all the paths right this time - changed them in C/C++ general settings, and made sure that I did not tick the 'workspace path' option, but use the workspace_loc variable; in that way, also the set paths in the toolchain include settings are ok

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

Nguyen Hoan Hoang — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 18:34:01 GMT

All the ble project are up to date. Blinky is a stand alone app that does not use BLE. I haven't update it yet. Except DFU project which is still SDK6. I got the DFU SDK7 compiled but there is an issue with iOS nRFTool. I haven't found the issue yet. Once I got it working, I'll update that as well.

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

wim — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 10:28:38 GMT

I re-entered the paths in the project properties>C/C++ General>Paths and Symbols; all is fine now. Another question: did you push the changes for the SDK7 to the Git hub? For example, the Blinky project, it still points to the old directories of SDK6 I think.

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

Nguyen Hoan Hoang — Sun, 04 Jan 2015 19:49:38 GMT

I develop entirely on MAC. by default Eclipse put the "}" at the end like this "${workspace_loc:/../../CMSIS/CMSIS/include}". That causes a problem some time, especially after an import. I had to manually change to "${workspace_loc:}/../../CMSIS/CMSIS/include" where the "{}" should enclose the macro only. There may be some path that still have the default. Try a full path on those you have issues with.

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

wim — Sun, 04 Jan 2015 10:16:30 GMT

I think I might have confused you: I did set the workspace in Eclipse as you discussed, so to the nRF51 directory. What I meant was, where should I put the source tree. I tried now to start completely from scratch, so:

check out the repository from Github
copy the downloaded CMSIS and nRF SDK to the position in the source tree as you suggested
select the nRF51 directory as workspace directory
imported existing projects.

On each of the projects, a warning is given on the includes directories; however, when I try to compile the CMSIS library, it does compile it properly, so the makefile does find the paths, and they are expanded correctly. So the problem is in Eclipse really. I read some things about the colon (:) working fine on Windows, but not in Linux. On what system did you develop this? I was guessing also on Mac, as you seemed quite knowledgable about this? I also read something about paths which are outside the tree of the workspace - the CMSIS directory is like that - that that might give problems. Any ideas?

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

Nguyen Hoan Hoang — Sun, 04 Jan 2015 10:13:17 GMT

The path used is relative to the workspace location. "${workspace_loc:}/../../CMSIS/CMSIS/include". It is based on the workspace being in the source tree. I have indicated where the workspace should be. Since your workspace is at different location you'll need to adjust the path based on your location.

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

wim — Sun, 04 Jan 2015 08:42:00 GMT

I did download the CMSIS library, and did put them in the source tree, as discussed on your blog. But there seems to be something wrong with the expansion of the path using the workspace_loc path variable. Is it important where I put the workspace? I put it in a sub directory of my Documents folder on Mac - is this a path which might conflict? I haven't tried the precompiled libs yet, but I agree that it would be best to have the compilation ok. My guess is that the other projects will also not compile because of the same path issues. I will give that a try and get back. Anyway, many thanks for the quick reply. It's very helpful!

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

Nguyen Hoan Hoang — Sat, 03 Jan 2015 22:44:46 GMT

The CMSIS Path, because you have not downloaded the CMSIS library from ARM and put in the source tree. There is a link to download the CMSIS on the EHAL page. It is general for all ARM development. The missing nrf51 path is because of the new SDK 7. All the source tree of the new SDK have changed. The projects are updated with SDK7. You'll need to change the path to location where you put the SDK. Importing existing project is fine. The SDK7 is very messy with include files all over the places. The folder nrf51422 and nrf51822 are the old SDK6.

I did put the precompiled CMSIS & EHAL lib in github. For quick start, you don't need to compile them. For long term, it may be best to get them compiled on your system.

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

wim — Sat, 03 Jan 2015 20:23:29 GMT

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?

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

Nguyen Hoan Hoang — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 17:57:52 GMT

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

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

wim — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 14:57:20 GMT

Hi,

Ok, will check this out. One question already though: can I use this on a MAC? I found this blog: devzone.nordicsemi.com/.../

But there I need to download also the S110-SD-v7, but that is not unlocked using the serial number of the beacon kit. So I need to buy an additional RF51 DK for that? (already bought 3 beacon kits...). Or is they S110-SD-v7 nothing but the hex file which I can also find in the beacon kit example software directories?

I want to use the bluetooth beacon feature, but also would like to microcontroller to talk to another peripheral device via SPI, the beacon kit seemed to be well equipped for that, to build my proof of concept. And would like also to use an external interrupt to count pulses. So: which example do I start from?

I did this already on a bt chip from TI, so, I have my application firmware available already, I would just like to port it to this platform now, as I believe the nRF chip will be a more future proof choice.

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

Vidar Berg — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 14:45:55 GMT

Hi, you may want to have a look at this blog post here for development with GCC and Eclipse. I used Eclipse Luna in this example, but recommend using Kepler instead as there's currently a minor bug in Luna CDT.

Bug description: "The debugger buttons are disabled If you upgraded to Eclipse Luna 4.4, and you notice that the debugger buttons are not available (in fact the buttons are still there, but are greyed/disabled), you are facing a Luna CDT bug. The workaround is to quit Eclipse and to retry." link

Here's a post on getting started with bluetooth development: devzone.nordicsemi.com/.../