![]() Having no support in the IDE for two thirds of those components makes for a lacklustre experience. Alas, if you make a change to those components (which happens a lot), you need to re-import the project because SES has no native support for those components.Ī Zephyr project is essentially a devicetree component, a Kconfig component and a C component. The modifications allow a NCS project to be imported, which during the importation process means the crucial devicetree and Kconfig components are processed. The IDE can't build a Zephyr projectĪ modified version of SEGGER Embedded Studio (SES) is offered as an IDE. The manual method from 1.5.0 (with my extra notes) works fine and leaves you with a re-usable installation. And when it fails you have a standalone 4GB installation that can't be remedied. In version 1.6.1 the new Toolchain Manager method is recommended. The above was true for nRF Connect SDK 1.5.0. As you read on you'll notice this theme cropping up a bit: using what you can find online to guide you in Zephyr land is fraught - you should just know. In the spirit of these things, I provided them back to Nordic who kindly responded saying that I shouldn't have followed their instructions because they're out of date. They really amount to "follow Nordic's instructions, except for two or three bum-steers, to avoid 10 hours of goose chasing". I restarted from scratch a couple of times to ensure I had a set of working instructions from start to finish, and published them here. The delta to a working installer is really quite small, but hard to ascertain. As is a common symptom of these sorts of projects, it suffers from too many well-meaning but incompatible sets of instructions, rather than one that just works. The installer is a commendable effort at wrangling a very complex process. It's an epic itself, and evolving just as rapidly as the elements it contains. Nordic provide Zephyr bundled with a bunch of Nordic-relevant additions in a software development kit called the nRF Connect SDK. One of the really challenging aspects of developing with Zephyr is that it is a fast moving target, so software repositories, reported issues and forum posts are more likely to be obsolete than not. Some of these bugs were fixed in updates released during the development process! Others may have been fixed since then too.Given the nature of Zephyr, bugs will vary significantly from target to target and manufacturer to manufacturer. Nordic wrap Zephyr in their nRF Connect SDK (NCS). This was my experience targeting the nRF9160 from Nordic Semiconductor.So, what follows is a record of the top seven cracks I tripped on on my first trip down Zephyr lane. Developers may find themselves confused guinea pigs, discovering lots of cracks while trying to navigate a formidable new landscape.ĭiscovering egregiously prominent bugs while you learn something for the first time is a frustrating experience. Like many modern software development projects however, it hasn't let the pursuit of perfection get in the way of shipping, to put it favourably. It is also highly likely to be a major and unavoidable choice for embedded firmware development, particularly for cellular projects. The open source Zephyr Project RTOS and build system is a tour de force. 11 min read Photo by Luis Villasmil / Unsplash. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |