ARM Development on Mac OS X?

[andersm]

f you don't need a GUI it is very easy to write portable code which compiles for both Windows and Unix based systems.

That may well be, but GCC still requires either MinGW or Cygwin (or atleast did the last time I cared about building a Windows-hosted toolchain). Many years ago the need to emulate fork and exec was cited as one reason large builds ran slower under Windows, maybe things have improved since then.

[free_electron]

... the fact is that NOBODY, develops such tools for MacOs.

Demonstratively false.

show me any commercial big name tool. Raisonance, Nohau , Keil , IAR, ARM RVDS, American Arium.
where are the Macos versions ?

[zapta]

... the fact is that NOBODY, develops such tools for MacOs.

Demonstratively false.

show me any commercial big name tool. Raisonance, Nohau , Keil , IAR, ARM RVDS, American Arium.
where are the Macos versions ?

Hmm, NOBODY became 'big names'....  That's a different statement.

[c4757p]

... the fact is that NOBODY, develops such tools for MacOs.

Demonstratively false.

show me any commercial big name tool. Raisonance, Nohau , Keil , IAR, ARM RVDS, American Arium.
where are the Macos versions ?

Hmm, NOBODY became 'big names'....  That's a different statement.

I don't think he considers anything that costs less than a car to be worth his time.

[zapta]

... the fact is that NOBODY, develops such tools for MacOs.

Demonstratively false.

show me any commercial big name tool. Raisonance, Nohau , Keil , IAR, ARM RVDS, American Arium.
where are the Macos versions ?

Hmm, NOBODY became 'big names'....  That's a different statement.

I don't think he considers anything that costs less than a car to be worth his time.

Subsidized car or full price?

[c4757p]

Not even going there. O0

[naragon1]

For toolchain you want https://launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded which is the version of GCC maintained by ARM.

http://gnuarmeclipse.github.io offers plugins and instructions for putting together an Eclipse-based IDE for basically any ARM Cortex based MCU.

I didn't mean for this thread to become a debate about OS. Just to close the loop, I went with the above setup which works great and was really easy to set up on OS X.  In case anyone is interested and they want to set up a similar toolchain on Windows, Andy Brown did a really nice write up going the other way: http://andybrown.me.uk/2015/03/22/stm32dev-windows/

[free_electron]

... the fact is that NOBODY, develops such tools for MacOs.

Demonstratively false.

show me any commercial big name tool. Raisonance, Nohau , Keil , IAR, ARM RVDS, American Arium.
where are the Macos versions ?

Hmm, NOBODY became 'big names'....  That's a different statement.

I don't think he considers anything that costs less than a car to be worth his time.

my statements are based on what i see being used in industrial settings. All the companies i have worked for , or have come in contact with, all use commercially available software and development systems.

Nohau, Ashling, Greenhills, ARM , Lauterbach , American Arium, Keil, IAR , and others, you name it.

Commercial tools.
not homebrew , not slapped together , not open source.

Not a single one for MAC. Maybe one for some *nix flavor.

Same goes for things like FPGA tools. win/*nix , no Macos.

In 23 years, i have never seen a hardware/firmware engineering lab that used Macs. EVEN AT APPLE ! MACS are designed using WINDOWS based CAD/CAE tools.

That's the simple truth. The ecosystem in that market is too small so nobody releases those kind of tools for that platform.
Don't get me wrong. I also have a Mac and various other Apple machines and like em very much, when running the applications these machines are designed for.

just get a cheap pc. besides : you don:t want to fry your 2700$ mac's usb port with a wonky soldered ftdi232 ... get a cheapo usb plugin card and fry that. 12$ gets you a 4 port usb pci card. fry em to your hearts content

[nctnico]

I depends completely on where you look. In the past 15 years I have been using GCC for several different microcontroller platforms almost exclusively and this wasn't initially my own choice!

[andersm]

It wasn't too long ago you'd get similar responses when asking about development on Linux.

[zapta]

my statements are based on what i see being used in industrial settings. All the companies i have worked for , or have come in contact with, all use commercially available software and development systems.

Nohau, Ashling, Greenhills, ARM , Lauterbach , American Arium, Keil, IAR , and others, you name it.

Commercial tools.
not homebrew , not slapped together , not open source.

Not a single one for MAC. Maybe one for some *nix flavor.

I have had excellent experience with LPCXpresso from NXP on Mac OSX, including seamless integration with hardware debuggers. Same Macbook Air 11" also does PCB design (eagle), 3D modeling (openscad) and 3D printing (Simplify3D).  Life is good.

[Sal Ammoniac]

show me any commercial big name tool. Raisonance, Nohau , Keil , IAR, ARM RVDS, American Arium.
where are the Macos versions ?

Rowley CrossWorks for ARM has a Mac OS version. Although Rowley may not be a "big name", CrossWorks is a fully professional tool that I wouldn't hesitate to use in a commercial environment.

The best thing about it is they have a personal license for USD$150 for hobbyists like me. This  is the full version too, not a limited or crippled version.

[c4757p]

f_e, actual manufacturers provide and support cross-platform development tools. If you don't think anybody uses them commercially, what funds their development?

Sounds more like you're trying to project your own experiences onto the entire industry.

[zapta]

naragon1, would be interesting to hear what you find and what works for you.

[free_electron]

f_e, actual manufacturers provide and support cross-platform development tools. If you don't think anybody uses them commercially, what funds their development?

Sounds more like you're trying to project your own experiences onto the entire industry.

Keil has nothing for mac
IAR  has nothing for mac
Nohau . zip
Lauterbach nada


All the 'traditional' (read : been around since the 70's) tool providers have nothing .

Show me a some. enlighten me. I would love to know about some , so i can convey them to people asking for these.
I don't know any , apart from some oddball like Crowley and a few 'slapped together' ( read we take eclipse and shove GCC up it's ass and release that). it gets even worse once you start throwing debuggers in the mix ( hardware debuggers , that are more than simple jtag or SWD dongles ). Then the field collapses to windows only.

It goes beyond that. Good luck finding something like a Can analyser , I2C, SPi, sniffer (like totalphase's) or any other kind of 'real' tools. Agilent doesn't have anything on Mac. Tek ? keithley ? Zilch. nop.

The playing field for MacOs for this kind of application is very small.
It is larger on linux  (and growing)
But windows still owns 90% of that stuff.

Why? i don't know. I'd assumed by know, given the 'techieness' of linux that there would ave been a switch, but it happens very very slowly.

[andersm]

Good luck finding something like a Can analyser , I2C, SPi, sniffer (like totalphase's) or any other kind of 'real' tools.

Total Phase have supported Macs for many years.

[zapta]

It goes beyond that. Good luck finding something like a Can analyser , I2C, SPi, sniffer (like totalphase's) or any other kind of 'real' tools. Agilent doesn't have anything on Mac. Tek ? keithley ? Zilch. nop.

I used Saleae + Mac to decode Linbus and it worked great. It can decode many of the protocols you mentioned and they even give you an SDK so you can decode proprietary protocols.

The Logic software has protocol analyzers that can automatically decode SPI, I2C, serial, 1-Wire, CAN, UNI/O, I2S/PCM, MP Mode, Manchester, Modbus, DMX-512, Parallel, JTAG, LIN, Atmel SWI, MDIO, SWD, LCD HD44780, BiSS C, HDLC, HDMI CEC, PS/2, USB 1.1, Midi – or create your own with the SDK.

anything-outside-of-my-horizons-doesn't-exist is silly.

[c4757p]

All the 'traditional' (read : been around since the 70's) tool providers have nothing .

Ah, I see. If you didn't grow up with them, they're not good enough.

[andersm]

I'm also going to go out on a limb and say the OP probably isn't in the market for a $10000 debugger, or interested in paying a couple of thousands per year in compiler maintenance fees anyway, so the point is kind of moot.

[naragon1]

naragon1, would be interesting to hear what you find and what works for you.

I went with gcc-arm-embedded and Eclipse. It works fine for me - no issues whatsoever. I'm used to development on Eclipse so it was a natural fit, plus it's free - can't beat that.

[zapta]

I went with gcc-arm-embedded and Eclipse. It works fine for me - no issues whatsoever. I'm used to development on Eclipse so it was a natural fit, plus it's free - can't beat that.

Great! What MCUs (or what vendor) are you using?

[free_electron]

All the 'traditional' (read : been around since the 70's) tool providers have nothing .

Ah, I see. If you didn't grow up with them, they're not good enough.

Look , we can keep dancing around this until we have a long grey beard.
old, new. doesn't matter.

go to all the ARM processor suppliers. look at the tools they provide (whether their own or 3rd party) and make a list. MACos will be slim pickins ...
go to all processor manufacturers for that matter. ARM 8051 , Renesas , Freescale , whatever. Look at the availability of native MacOs based tools.

Go for it. prove me wrong ! Show me a list of macos tools for those things, so the next time someone asks me if there are any , i can answer yes and give them the list.

[naragon1]

I went with gcc-arm-embedded and Eclipse. It works fine for me - no issues whatsoever. I'm used to development on Eclipse so it was a natural fit, plus it's free - can't beat that.

Great! What MCUs (or what vendor) are you using?

I'm playing around with an STM32F4 Discovery board. I don't do this for a living, it's just for fun. Hence all the more reason I'm not willing to shell out thousands for a "commercial" grade IDE. I'm pretty comfortable around a command line, so I don't mind struggling with GCC and other such tools.

[nctnico]

f_e, actual manufacturers provide and support cross-platform development tools. If you don't think anybody uses them commercially, what funds their development?

Sounds more like you're trying to project your own experiences onto the entire industry.

Keil has nothing for mac
IAR  has nothing for mac
Nohau . zip
Lauterbach nada

All the 'traditional' (read : been around since the 70's) tool providers have nothing .

So what? None of the traditional car makers make decent electric cars. Does that mean that there shouldn't be any electric cars? 

[rsjsouza]

All the 'traditional' (read : been around since the 70's) tool providers have nothing .

Ah, I see. If you didn't grow up with them, they're not good enough.

Look , we can keep dancing around this until we have a long grey beard.
old, new. doesn't matter.

go to all the ARM processor suppliers. look at the tools they provide (whether their own or 3rd party) and make a list. MACos will be slim pickins ...
go to all processor manufacturers for that matter. ARM 8051 , Renesas , Freescale , whatever. Look at the availability of native MacOs based tools.

Go for it. prove me wrong ! Show me a list of macos tools for those things, so the next time someone asks me if there are any , i can answer yes and give them the list.

free_electron, I also see a similar scenario in professional dev tools, but recently TI released its IDE for MacOS and had native command-line compilers for some time. In this case, I can't help but think the marketplace is changing.