pc ble driver connectivity build

[arden-hills-sw]

I tried building the pc ble driver connectivity hex build.

I tried various ways to build it with different command shells and:

1: I saw the error "couldn't find make."

2: I also saw the error "could not find pthread.h"

so:

3: should I use the Visual Studio 2019 dev prompt shell to do the build? if I use a different command shell, I see the error: "can't find cmake."

4: how do I verify that the build is using the installed arm compiler?

5: how do I verify that pthread.h can be found?

As a side question: the pc ble driver build instructions don't seem to indicate the final goal for the "connectivity hex build."

Given that I'm working with the nrf52840 dev board, am I supposed to install the S140 soft device, first, and then install the connectivity hex build, next?

i.e. I'm not sure how the connectivity hex build "pulls in" the S140 soft device; so I'm thinking the S140 soft device gets installed separately but I'm not sure...

Thanks!

[Susheel Nuguru]

Hi,

I am not an expert in this but it looks like this is an issue with your toolchain where your setup cannot find few files/headers/executables in your system and/or build path. This is something you need to resolve first to proceed further in your development.

Given that I'm working with the nrf52840 dev board, am I supposed to install the S140 soft device, first, and then install the connectivity hex build, next?

In the overview section of the pc-ble-driver clearly mentions that

pc-ble-driver consists of a set of static and shared libraries that provide SoftDevice functionality to the application via serial port communication with an nRF5 connectivity chip running the SoftDevice and connectivity software, included as a single .hex file here. For more information on SoftDevice serialization see Serialization.

You need to install first the connectivity firmware which inturn has softdevice built into it.

[arden-hills-sw]

Susheel,

should:

    choco install make

be part of the build pc-ble-driver instructions?

[Susheel Nuguru]

Yes that should install cmake into your environment but make sure that it is added into your system path. This is a simple environment setup issue on how to install cmake and make your terminal see cmake by putting the cmake path in the system path.

[arden-hills-sw]

After some analysis: visual studio comes with CMake, so it doesn't need to be installed.  It seems like CMake calls make so I had to install make.  Moreover, the master branch seems broken; I couldn't build the connectivity hex files until I switched to a labeled release branch.  Git also installs bash and sh; to get the build to work, I had to rename sh.exe to hide.sh.exe and bash to hide.bash.exe.

I'll create another thread to ask if pc-ble-driver was ported to Zephyr since it looks like the nRF52 SDK is being phased out.