Skip to content

Getting Started

Jump to bottom
Charles R. Portwood II edited this page Apr 3, 2022 · 3 revisions

Within this section is documentation for getting a development environment set-up to compile Kaidyth Bootloader on your own machine.

Software Requirements

Before you get started, you'll need to download and install a few dependencies.

  1. First, you need to download the latest ARM toolchain

Kaidyth Bootloader has been tested with 2019-q4-major. Support for other toolchains is at the developers discretion.

After downloading and extracting the toolchain, add the bin/ directory to your $PATH environment variable.

  1. Download and install Nordic SDK 16.0.0

Extract the Nordic SDK and set NORDIC_SDK_PATH environment variable to the extracted directory.

Note that you may need to adjust components/toolchain/gcc/Makefile.posix with the path to the ARM GCC bin directory.

  1. Install the nRF Command Line Tools provide mergehex and nrfjprog, which you may need in the event of a bad flash or bootloader change.

  2. Install micro-ecc library following the instructions at https://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.nordic.infocenter.sdk5.v15.0.0%2Fsdk_app_serial_dfu_bootloader.html.

Hardware Recommendations

Depending upon your board, the only piece of hardware that you may need is a USB cable in order to flash the Kaidyth Bootloader application to your device.

In the event your chip becomes bricked however and you want to recover, I recommend buying a cheap J-Link SWD Debugger, such as the J-Link EDU Mini as they are at the time of writing only $20 USD.

Building Kaidyth Bootloader

If you're wanting to use the existing keypair provided with the repository, symlink the provided keys:

ln -s default_private.pem private.pem
ln -s default_dfu_public_key.c dfu_public_key.c

Otherwise, running make will generate a build specific keypair for you to use for your bootloader.

Once you have all the software dependencies installed, compiling Kaidyth Bootloader is as simple as running make <board>. A list of boards will be printed out of a board is not specified.

make
Makefile:5: *** Specified a board to build pca10059, mdk-usb-dongle, sparkfun-pro-mini.  Stop.

Flashing

Once your program is built, you can flash the program directly from make by running the following command:

  1. Put your device into DFU mode. Most devices can be put into DFU by double tapping the RST button. As the reset procedure varies per board, reference the board specific implementation in the Adafruit nRF52 Bootload repository.

  2. Flash your board with the appropriate image.

make BOARD=mdk-usb-dongle clean_flash

Flashing may take a few seconds. Do not unplug the dongle during flashing as it may corrupt the chip.

Debug Mode

The bootloader can be put into debug mode by setting the DEBUG=1 make variable at compile time.

make DEBUG=1 BOARD=mdk-usb-dongle clean_flash
Clone this wiki locally