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Some time in 2013 NXP released the LPC810 microcontroller. It is a 32 bit ARM Cortex M0+ processor in an 8 pin DIP package. I had been wanting to play with ARM chips for some time, but the surface mount packages and sometimes odd programming systems was always a hindrance. I wasn't overly thrilled with the limitatins of that chip (4K flash, 1K RAM, 8 pins) but it was interesting and an easy way to get started. I bought two starter kits from Adafruit and started playing around. The dev tools were OK, but I wasn't thrilled. Some parts were just weird, some not open source. At about the same time, I found out NXP had another ARM chip in DIP package, the LPC1114. It is an older design, based on the Cortex M0, but much more useful. It has 28 pins, 32K of flash, and 4K of RAM. Upon investigating, I found the same problems with the toolchains available. But I was hooked!
I decided I would take the bare ARM_GCC toolchain and customize it for the NXP chips, exactly the way I thought it should be. Below is the current state of this journey. It is an ongoing work and new releases will be posted here as they are ready. The first release is very basic and incomplete. But it is workable. I am including either links to or the files themselves for the tools needed to use what I have written. Essentially you need the ARM-GCC package appropriate for your system and Gnu Make if it is not already installed on your computer. All the development is currently being done on Linux. Not much testing has been done as of yet. Most of the source code will not be posted at first. I am sure things will change and I don't want incompatible versions floating around. Eventually, of course, all the source code will be released.
Release 0.0.1 -- The first one. A very basic early release (less than Alpha quality)
The initial alpha release of the new downloader (currently called bdkdev, but that will change) is
here . This is
the Windows installer. It should run on anything from Windows XP on.
The files for use on Linux are
here . To run on Linux,
unzip the file. It will create a directory with 5 files in it. Run the executable from the command line or
from your desktop of choice and the gui mode should run. You MUST have installed the mono runtime on your
Linux system before doing this or it won't work. From the command line type "./bdkdev" to run it. I will work
on an install system for Linux later.