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Embedded and Microcontrollers
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Embedded and Microcontrollers
Embedded Forum ARM Keil MDK is free (sort-of)
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  • Replies 35 replies
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  • mdkarm
  • keil
  • mdk
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ARM Keil MDK is free (sort-of)

shabaz
shabaz over 3 years ago

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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  • scottiebabe
    scottiebabe over 3 years ago +2
    This is great news! That is one of my biggest complaints about the Pico, trying to setup the c development environment is way too complicated for a causal complier user.... I like one button installs,…
  • WestfW
    WestfW over 3 years ago in reply to scottiebabe +2
    > When you use the ardunio framework somewhere there is a trigger to have the rp2040 reset into bootloader mode (I'm not sure how its done) Arduino uses a hack where setting the usb/serial bitrate to…
  • Fred27
    Fred27 over 3 years ago +2
    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…
Parents
  • scottiebabe
    scottiebabe over 3 years ago

    This is great news! That is one of my biggest complaints about the Pico, trying to setup the c development environment is way too complicated for a causal complier user.... I like one button installs, like with MPLabx.

    It would appear Kiel is using the arm v6 toolchain developer.arm.com/.../0611. I have no idea how the arm complier compares to gcc-arm, that is well above my pay grade...

    Thanks for sharing this news, I will have to give it a try in the near future!

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  • GorgonMeducer
    GorgonMeducer over 2 years ago in reply to scottiebabe

    I have created a Pico-Template which is an MDK project. So you can use MDK for all Pico development, such as coding, compiling (using Arm Compiler 6), debugging etc.

    For debugging, you don't need an extra Pico working as a debugger adapter, and the pico template retargets printf to MDK debug (printf) view window. A software reset button has been added to the project.

    Enjoy~

    github.com/.../Pico_Template

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  • scottiebabe
    scottiebabe over 2 years ago in reply to GorgonMeducer

    This is amazing! Thank you so much for sharing your hard work setting up a pico a template. I am downloading the 856 MB MDK as I type this Slight smile.

    I will try it out and let you know how it goes. Thanks again for sharing your project!

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  • scottiebabe
    scottiebabe over 2 years ago in reply to GorgonMeducer

    This is amazing! Thank you so much for sharing your hard work setting up a pico a template. I am downloading the 856 MB MDK as I type this Slight smile.

    I will try it out and let you know how it goes. Thanks again for sharing your project!

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