Shell - getting started

[Soupdragon]

I'm using Visual Studio 1.7.1 on Windows 10 machine. With an nrf916DK.

I'm trying to learn about the shell and all seems to be working fine, based on what I've found in the Zephyr docs. But I need a little help with the high-level stuff.

I've got all the usual 'CONFIG_SHELL' statements in prj.conf but nothing that seems to explicitly define the Shell transport layer, eg no sign of UART0 anywhere, although UART0 seems to have been assumed.

How do i specify a specific transport layer, and how do I open multiple instances ? Can I, for example, run two separate shell instances, one on UART0 and the other on UART2 ?

Can anyone help, or point me in the direction of additional shell docs ?

[Einar Thorsrud]

Hi,

UART0 is used by default. You can use an overlay to specify another UART instance with chosen if you want to use another instance (see an example of that in usb.overlay the Shell sample, though here USB is specified  instead of a different UART instance). You can refer to overlay-usb.conf from the same sample to see how you can specify another transport.

Regarding default configurations that comes from the Kconfig files that define the configurations, for instance backends comes from zephyr\subsys\shell\backends\Kconfig.backends. There you can see for instance SHELL_BACKEND_SERIAL use the device tree (if present). And for the nRF9160 DK this ends up in zephyr\boards\arm\nrf9160dk_nrf9160\nrf9160dk_nrf9160_common.dts where that is specified to uart0. To change that use an overlay as explained above.