Using Zephyr#

Developing directly in Zephyr will not be ultimately required for end-users who won’t touch the firmware running on BeagleConnect™ Freedom and will instead use the BeagleConnect™ Greybus functionality, but is important for early adopters as well as people looking to extend the functionality of the open source design. If you are one of those people, this is a good place to get started.

Equipment to begin development#

There are many options, but using BeaglePlay gives a reasonable common environment. Please adjust as you see fit.

Required#

Install the SDK on BeaglePlay#

You can use BeaglePlay as the primary development board for setting up the Zephyr environment for BeagleConnect Freedom. To setup Zephyr on BeaglePlay, see Setup Zephyr development on BeaglePlay.

The instructions linked above setup the environment for targeting BeaglePlay’s on CC1352. We need to change it to target BeagleConnect Freedom. You can directly go on to Step 5 under Zephyr setup for BeagleConnect Freedom.

Zephyr setup for BeagleConnect Freedom#

To setup Zephyr on your machine for running modules on BeagleConnect Freedom, follow the given instructions :

  1. First, install the Zephyr SDK bundle:

    cd ~
    wget https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/sdk-ng/releases/download/v0.15.1/zephyr-sdk-0.16.8_linux-aarch64_minimal.tar.gz
    wget -O - https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/sdk-ng/releases/download/v0.16.8/sha256.sum | shasum --check --ignore-missing
    

Tip

Find the all releases on Zephyr SDK Tags page, change to the version of the sdk according to your requirement. Also, you may replace aarach64 with the host system you are currently working with.

  1. Extract the Zephyr SDK bundle:

    tar xf zephyr-sdk-0.16.8_linux-aarch64_minimal.tar.gz
    

Important

It is recommended to extract the Zephyr SDK bundle at one of the following locations:

- $HOME
- $HOME/.local
- $HOME/.local/opt
- $HOME/bin
- /opt
- /usr/local

The Zephyr SDK bundle archive contains the zephyr-sdk-0.16.8 directory and, when extracted under $HOME directory, the resulting installation path will be <$HOME/zephyr-sdk-<version>.

  1. Run the Zephyr SDK bundle setup script:

    cd zephyr-sdk-0.16.8
    ./setup.sh
    
  2. Further, go on to setup the BeagleConnect Freedom (BCF)’s SDK.

    west init -m https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr --mr sdk zephyr-beagle-cc1352-sdk
    cd $HOME/zephyr-beagle-cc1352-sdk
    python3 -m venv zephyr-beagle-cc1352-env
    
  3. Export the required variables as given below:

    echo "export ZEPHYR_TOOLCHAIN_VARIANT=zephyr" >> $HOME/zephyr-beagle-cc1352-sdk/zephyr-beagle-cc1352-env/bin/activate
    echo "export ZEPHYR_SDK_INSTALL_DIR=$HOME/zephyr-sdk-0.16.8" >> $HOME/zephyr-beagle-cc1352-sdk/zephyr-beagle-cc1352-env/bin/activate
    echo "export ZEPHYR_BASE=$HOME/zephyr-beagle-cc1352-sdk/zephyr" >> $HOME/zephyr-beagle-cc1352-sdk/zephyr-beagle-cc1352-env/bin/activate
    echo 'export PATH=$HOME/zephyr-beagle-cc1352-sdk/zephyr/scripts:$PATH' >> $HOME/zephyr-beagle-cc1352-sdk/zephyr-beagle-cc1352-env/bin/activate
    echo "export BOARD=beagleplay" >> $HOME/zephyr-beagle-cc1352-sdk/zephyr-beagle-cc1352-env/bin/activate
    source $HOME/zephyr-beagle-cc1352-sdk/zephyr-beagle-cc1352-env/bin/activate
    west update
    west zephyr-export
    pip3 install -r zephyr/scripts/requirements-base.txt
    

Note

You might need to change the version of the Zephyr-SDK based on the SDK setup done in Step 1.

Try demo applications#

Now you can build various Zephyr applications

Build and flash Blinky#

Note

Before building any example, ensure to run this command:

source $HOME/zephyr-beagle-cc1352-sdk/zephyr-beagle-cc1352-env/bin/activate

Run the build and flash commands. Make sure to connect the BeagleConnect Freedom to your computer before flashing.

cd $ZEPHYR_BASE
west build zephyr/samples/basic/blinky
west flash

Zephyr Documentation#

You can refer to Zephyr Getting Started for further development!

Debug applications over the serial terminal#