This post is older than 2 years and might not be relevant anymore
More Info: Consider searching for newer posts

Is there a free IDE which is official recommended and multi-platform?

Hi, everyone. Long time no see.

I wonder if there is a free IDE which is official recommended. As we know that Keil and IAR are all commerical software. GCC command line tool is poor for debugging because it is not an IDE.

As a contrast to nRF SDK, TI offers an IDE called Code Composer Studio (CCS). If developers use CCS and TI LunchPad together, CCS will be free. And new TI BLE STACKs supports CCS IDE. It is especially good for macOS and Linux users and evaluators.

So I want to ask will nRF SDK natively support a free multi-platform IDE such as eclipse or Segger Embedded Studio(SES)?

  • Segger Embedded Studio is not actually free, if you carefully read the license doc it is only free for evaluation / non commercial, but is not size limited

    Keil has an evaluation version, which is size limited 32k application size, but as most of the API is in the SD not in the application code, most of the examples in the SDK will compile in the evaluation version of Keil - however you can't use it for commercial projects, as the license is for evaluation only

    Eclipse is the only IDE which is truely free and unlimited, and Nordic have a blog entry about setting it up and using it. However the build process is not fully integrated in the blog post, as it still uses the external makefile used for command line GCC builds

    Visual GDB is another possible option, but its Not Free, but is quite low cost (around $100 last time I checked)

    Or you could simply use your own favourite editor and use the gcc makefile. You can still use Segger OZone to debug if you have a JLink.

  • Yes, Roger. You are right. I also think Eclpise is the truly free IDE. But the SDK projects need to be merge to eclipse. I met a lot of problem when merging the projects in nRF SDK following the blog post. If Nordic can offer a native eclipse project and developers can just use it like keil, just click "import a project" then all is OK, developers can decrease many repetitive works.

  • @Bee

    I agree, it would be better if there was an easier way to get started with Eclipse, as I had a lot of problems setting up a project in Eclipse.

    BTW. I didn't find it much easier to setup Segger Embedded Studio, and I found out after installing that I can't use it for any commercial projects (as its licensing conditions are somewhat confusing)

    Keil and IAR appear to be the only projects which "just work" (and I don't have IAR because this is only a time limited evaluation version)

    I only have the Keil evaluation installed as its sometimes easier to open an example project in Keil, just to see what drivers and components etc are used for specific types of example.

  • You can try this blog for Eclipse & GCC with ARM based dev. Same Eclipse, multiple targets. Has native Eclipse project examples no makefile, including dfu.

  • Thanks for the link

    That was the blog I saw, which used a native build process.

    I didn't realise it was your blog ;-)

    Its probably worth me trying Eclipse again now.

Related