ARM Keil MDK is free (sort-of)

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

my directory's are as follows

NexGen

    ADI-ARU-50.A     //one of 26 modules

    RSS

        src

             Java

                    Main

                    Test

         Radios

              C-3436A-ARN-30     // one of eight modules

                    Docs

                    src

                        Arduino

                             C-3436

                                     C-3436.ino

                                     C-3436.h

                        Java

Please don't get me wrong this is a very large project     As well as a Top-level NexGen dir there is also a E-14 with a similar layout this Layout is handy in Eclipse IDE as it uses Mylyn layout but uses Gradle for my builds much nicer than make. 

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.)

Wait - have you actually managed to install Keil support for RPi Pico?  I don't see even the rp2040 in their "packs", and I'd think that configuring Keil to use the SDK would be a significant effort!

(or is this just a "side discussion"?)

> 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 1200bps causes a chip reset (and enter bootloader.)
Entering the bootloader via application SW command is easy - there's an SDK/ROM function for that: reset_usb_boot()

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.