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This is a step by step tutorial discussing the required software on your Windows or Linux machine, some recommended hardware and the programming hardware. The steps required to compile the libraries and build the test applications depending on the board(s) you want to use are explained in detail.

Prerequisites

Building firmware images for the uracoli suported boards basically requires a AVR-GCC toolchain to compile the applications and a programming tool to flash the firmware into the microcontroller.

The setup of a working AVR tool chain is described here.

If you want to add your own board configurations and variants to the build process, you need to install Scons on your PC.

A mercurial client is needed to obtain the latest sources from the repository.

To build the documentation, the tools Doxygen and Graphviz are needed

Some of the applications communicate via a serial interface with the PC. In most of the cases a terminal application like minicom or hyperterm is sufficent but in some cases a PC application is needed for postprocessing the receveived data. Those applications are written in the Python scripting language using the module pyserial.

Building the Firmware

How the firmware is build from the source code, is described in this section.

The result of the build process are firmware files with the name <appname>_<boardname>.hex, which can be flashed in the microcontroller of the apropriate board.

Installing and Upgrading Python

All of the µracoli tools, like sterm, wibohost and sniffer are written in the plattform independent scripting language Python. Since all of the tools use the serial interface to communicate with hardware, the additional package pyserial needs to be installed. Nowadays additional Python packages are distributed via the web site Python Package Index (PyPI) and they are installed with the tool pip. Some Python distributions come with a preinstalled pip tool, e.g. ActiveState Python or Python for MacOS. Not so the standard distributions from http://www.python.org. In order to get pip running, you need to do the following steps. Once pip is running the installation of additional packages is straight forward.

Ubuntu Linux

  • Install Python and PIP: 

   sudo apt-get install python python-pip
Windows

  • Download from http://www.python.org/ the Windows Installer, e.g. python-2.7.3.msi and run the file.

  • Next download and run the file setuptools-0.6c11.win32-py2.7.exe. Note that this file is for Python 2.7 (setuptools….py2.7.exe). Be sure that you download the right package for your Python version.

  • Open a command shell cmd.exe and add the following path names: 

    set PATH=c:\Python27;c:\Python27\Scripts;%PATH%

  • Install PIP: 

    easy_install pip
All Plattforms

  • Install pyserial: 

    pip install pyserial
Note

If you access the internet via a proxy, you need to set the environment variable http_proxy first, e.g. with the command:

    set http_proxy=http://proxy.myorg.org:8080

Alternatively you can also use the --proxy option of pip. For the syntax of this option, especially with authenticated proxies, type pip --help.

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Last modified: 2017-06-04 Visitor Counter