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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've only ever used Keil when exploring the Cortex M0 and M3 soft processors on Xilinx FPGAs. Keil was the only IDE supported and was way to expensive to consider beyond experimenting using the free trial.

    I'm still finding Visual Studio Code hard to beat for it's flexibility. Within just the last month I've used it for developing in:

    • Python for scripting Unreal Engine
    • Lua and C++ for a custom desktop product
    • Rust on the desktop
    • Embedded Rust (on the micro:bit)
    • Embedded C++ on the Pico
    • As my go-to text editor for YAML, TOML, markdown, etc.
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  • I've only ever used Keil when exploring the Cortex M0 and M3 soft processors on Xilinx FPGAs. Keil was the only IDE supported and was way to expensive to consider beyond experimenting using the free trial.

    I'm still finding Visual Studio Code hard to beat for it's flexibility. Within just the last month I've used it for developing in:

    • Python for scripting Unreal Engine
    • Lua and C++ for a custom desktop product
    • Rust on the desktop
    • Embedded Rust (on the micro:bit)
    • Embedded C++ on the Pico
    • As my go-to text editor for YAML, TOML, markdown, etc.
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