nRF51822 mbed bug with Mac OSX Yosemite

[Rei]

Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite rejects the format of the file system and puts it in a read only mode.

This issue was raised last October 24, 2014 at https://github.com/mbedmicro/CMSIS-DAP/issues/69 and is still open.

Work-arounds are available at https://developer.mbed.org/users/okano/notebook/mbed-on-yosemite/ but are not 100% reliable.

All mbed boards are affected, including Nucleo, Freedom, RedBearLab.

This is a tricky and potentially endless issue, as both the boards manufacturers and the OS developers can blame each other.

Any official answer from Nordic for the mbed-enabled boards?

[RK]

I've had a support case open for months and Nordic are waiting for MBED. There were issues also with the Segger part of the driver, and Segger fixed those very quickly after Nordic reported them.

The current beta 10.10.3 of OSX doesn't display this issue, by the way. Despite all the conversation on those threads pointing to deficiencies with the mass storage device in the current MBED firmware, clearly something has been changed in OSX to make it more compatible with things which used to work in Mavericks.

So hopefully when 10.10.3 ships it won't matter that MBED hasn't fixed it.

My personal opinion:

I feel pretty let down by MBED here. As far as I understand ARM promotes MBED on the basis that it's browser-based, cross platform, not tied to an old development environment (Keil) and is write-anywhere, run-anywhere. However looking at the response to this issue, which has seen slow fixes for a few boards, not including nrf51-based or anything using the ATMTEL chip, the fact that constant requests for information and status have elicited absolutely no reply at all from MBED, that it's dragged on for over 4 months and that, in order to even try to contribute you have to have a windows-based licensed Keil environment (*) has left me feeling MBED is only cross-platform to the extent it's easy for it to be and their support for anything other than Windows is very secondary.

I don't blame Nordic here, they are at the mercy of what seems like a very small team at MBED, plus a few volunteers, and a git repository which has more branches and cruft than a large forest. I'm sure they signed up to make MBED-compatible boards expecting support for them.

If I were Nordic however I'd find someone in-house to work through the MBED code and take over the support for anything Nordic/nrf51-related, but I don't know how practical that is. I'm sure it's not something they were expecting to have to do.

(*) I assume this is the case by the way, that you need a full Keil to develop the firmware, I asked on that thread but nobody replied to that either, I was prepared to try fixing it myself if I could have built the firmware with OSX tools.

[Rei]

Thank you for your answer. As you fully understood the question, my purpose was to raise awareness about the lack of a quick official answer from ARM, mbed and the vendors.

IMHO, mbed developers are focused on the next big thing, mbed OS 3, and no longer on the mbed SDK available today.

Copying an executable on the mass storage device of the board is a key feature of mbed. So let's hope next version of Mac OS X 10.10.3 fixes this issue for good.