ARM Keil MDK is free (sort-of)

BAD NEWS!!! THIS ONLY SUPPORTS MS  BLOATWARE!  No big deal I will just, have to use the GCC toolchain with Eclipse. 

Hi Cris,

It's Windows-only as you say (the website mentions some people have got it to run using Wine on Linux I've never tried that). I like GCC too, but prefer that from the command-line. Currently I have no choice, the example Keil project based code I'm using has project settings that are beyond my skill-set to port to either Eclipse or a Makefile.

go to the eclipse store?  and grab the toolchain. fins here is the video on how to.

go to the eclipse store?  and grab the toolchain. fins here is the video on how to. I found this on Youtube "Add GNU ARM Plug-ins to Eclipse IDE"

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RE: ARM Keil MDK is free (sort-of)

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eclipse is a very easy IDE to use. Download the one w/ Java in it. fins.  follow the prompts and tell to install C/C++ modules 

then look at the video and install the TOOL CHAIN for ARM v6

I don't see how that solves the Keil vs Gnu compiler/assembler compatibility issues.  Is there an Eclipse or gcc package that explicitly provides Keil compatibility?

what compatibility issues are you talking about? basically gcc is the gold standard of C/C++ compilers. and btw West did you bother to look at the post I did about 1hr before your post! (hint the one with the video)

I don't know for sure, since Keil has always been too expensive for me, or eliminated for other reasons.  @shabaz says they have vendor-provided example Keil projects that won't build with Eclipse/gcc, and I see no reason not to believe them.
There are a couple of obvious incompatibilities:

• The Keil assembler implements the ARM-defined assembly language, while gas take liberties in the name of commonality over a wide range of CPU architectures.
• The Keil linker uses "scatter/gather" config files where gcc uses "linker scripts."
• Presumably the meta-data describing a "project" is substantially different between MDK and Eclipse.  My projects have always been either small enough that I'm happy with an editor and a Makefile, or big enough that there is a "tools team" that handles the complicated part.

And a bunch of things to worry about:

• pragmas, attributes, and intrinsics (hopefully CMSIS mitigates the intrinsics issue.)
• some sort of "pack" support to drag in the chip-specific definitions.  Keil supports a lot of chips; I'm not sure about eclipse.  And manually installing vendor .h files can be a pain.
• embedded ARM gcc environments tend to use newlib or newlib-nano, Keil has their own libc implementation. (and something similar for C++)
• Keil has a bunch of middleware libraries with license issues in a gcc environment.  If the code you're trying to port uses them, all the language-level compatibility in the world won't be very helpful.

Dealing with this is all "bread and butter" for an "embedded SW engineer", but is surely really annoying if all you want to do is try out a vendor's example code.

(and yes, I saw your post with the video.  Which afaict is about installing arm-gcc, nothing Keil-specific.  That's what prompted my comment.)

Hi,

I didn't see the comments, the e-mail notifications seem to have stopped : (

It's exactly that, it's the incompatible project build stuff, and nothing to do with installing GNU tools, I can install those.

phoenixcomm it's the porting of project build settings, which would need someone to go into Keil and Eclipse, to translate from the Keil format (it uses it's own proprietary configuration files). I could do that, but it could take weeks of effort for someone like me who doesn't know Keil to learn it enough to translate those files - I can only manage with traditional Makefiles.

Also the assembler stuff for sure would get awkward, because there will be differences in file formats for .asm files between Keil and GNU ARM, so if any assembler source is present then that needs converting, plus many assembler directives will look different between Keil and GNU. The linker settings like particular RAM and Flash regions will be specified differently too, so that needs translation as well. This is all work I'd rather not do if it's not a paid-job task.

The projects in question are in a separate Blog post Easy, Cost-Effective Bluetooth LE (BLE) with Dialog DA14531MOD  which was the motivation for using Keil, because 95% of the manufacturer examples for that chip/module use Keil. 

try to use Gradle for your build scripts. And yes there is an eclipse plug-in for it. but you will have to install it. (automation tool)

this is a good guide. Building Java Projects with Gradle  and here is a good book (free pdf) Gradle Goodness notebook

The problem is that Kiel is using an "Open-Source CPU" and trying to re-invent the wheel. Eclipse/GCC works well. and for the most part Eclipse auto-builds the project for you. if you look at the Kiel download page, you will see libraries download and install them via Eclipse.

The problem is that the Kiel stuff is NOT OPEN and does not play well with gcc. You cant expect the stuff, that was written and targeted for Windows to work out of the box with LINUX/Eclipse/gcc. ALL of the calls will be very different. ie just try to open a stream under windows.. good luck chuck.

I hope my 2 cents (rant) helps makes this murky water a little clearer.

/~Cris

try to use Gradle for your build scripts. And yes there is an eclipse plug-in for it. but you will have to install it. (automation tool)

this is a good guide. Building Java Projects with Gradle  and here is a good book (free pdf) Gradle Goodness notebook

The problem is that Kiel is using an "Open-Source CPU" and trying to re-invent the wheel. Eclipse/GCC works well. and for the most part Eclipse auto-builds the project for you. if you look at the Kiel download page, you will see libraries download and install them via Eclipse.

The problem is that the Kiel stuff is NOT OPEN and does not play well with gcc. You cant expect the stuff, that was written and targeted for Windows to work out of the box with LINUX/Eclipse/gcc. ALL of the calls will be very different. ie just try to open a stream under windows.. good luck chuck.

I hope my 2 cents (rant) helps makes this murky water a little clearer.

/~Cris

Keil is only for Cortex-M microcontrollers (as far as I'm aware), it's not a general-purpose IDE for (say) Linux or Windows app development.

Learning Gradle is definitely on my list of tasks to do at some point! : ) Currently I'm learning cmake. Not because I have any major interest in that above other systems, but when working with other people's projects I need to understand how things work as-is in the system that is being used, before considering another method.

Same with Keil, if a project already supports it, it will be impossible to consider a different build system, without understanding how the Keil project is configured, so I cannot get away with avoiding it.