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ARM Keil MDK is free (sort-of)

shabaz

For ages, the Keil development environment/compiler which they call MDK (Microcontroller Development Kit) has been a chargeable product, extremely unaffordable for home use : (

It's really annoying when microcontroller manufacturers only supply sample code using Keil. It's not always easy to port the project files to Eclipse, often it's hard and a lot of work!

For curiosity I re-logged onto the Keil website today, and noticed there is now a Community Edition! The announcement was in March it seems.

There doesn't seem to be a code limit, which is great. 

I just now tried to build some sample code from Dialog Semiconductor (they have cheap BLE chips but 95% of the more useful example projects are with Keil, not Eclipse, hence the interest) and it worked and I was able to download to the target eval board, which has an integrated J-Link, so that works too. I'm still learning how to use Keil, it's new to me.

image

Keil has a pack system which is quite neat.. I've only installed the Dialog specific pack so far:

image

Anyway, I just thought I'd mentioned that the community edition was available, in case anyone else is interested in trying it too.

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  • I'm a very long term user of the Keil tools for ARM (17years+) and I still think its the best integrated and least hassle IDE.

    The Pro version is pricey but it looks to me as if you get a lot of the important stuff in the community version.

    MK

  • in reply to michaelkellett

    Hi Michael,

    I spent some time trying it out today, and it's refreshing that the Help pages are actually helpful : ) I managed to run a few example projects and created a project from scratch (which had linking issues but I'm not too fussed, I know I can fix that by copying over the settings from one of the working projects) and got the on-board J-link working and the virtual serial port.

    It is easier to use than the many Eclipse variants that are different for each microcontroller manufacturer.  The packs method is well-executed.

    I spent way too long setting up the syntax highlighting colours : ) It has to be "just right" : )

    image

    Visual Code is better with auto-completion (it places round and curly brackets automatically for instance) but other than that, I was happy using the code editor in MDK.

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  • in reply to michaelkellett

    Hi Michael,

    I spent some time trying it out today, and it's refreshing that the Help pages are actually helpful : ) I managed to run a few example projects and created a project from scratch (which had linking issues but I'm not too fussed, I know I can fix that by copying over the settings from one of the working projects) and got the on-board J-link working and the virtual serial port.

    It is easier to use than the many Eclipse variants that are different for each microcontroller manufacturer.  The packs method is well-executed.

    I spent way too long setting up the syntax highlighting colours : ) It has to be "just right" : )

    image

    Visual Code is better with auto-completion (it places round and curly brackets automatically for instance) but other than that, I was happy using the code editor in MDK.

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