mdaiter / electronics

Blinky for Teensy 3.1 without Ardiuno IDE

Kevin Cuzner

Based on the article by Karl Lunt: http://www.seanet.com/~karllunt/bareteensy31.html

Purpose

I really don't like the Arduino IDE. It lacks so many basic features that it is almost rendered unusable (IMO) to people who have used a variety of IDEs. The point of this is to demonstrate building a program for the Teensy 3.1 outside the Arduino IDE while still using the utilities provided by Teensyduino. I can't quite call this bare metal since the Teensyduino library provides assistance, but its certainly close enough for me.

The main difference between this an Karl Lunt's Makefile is that this is meant to use only the Teensyduino source files rather than also needing some source from freescale. This is purely for my own personal preference.

Another difference is that this Makefile uses the src/obj/bin structure which I have always wanted to have in a Makefile.

How to use

This isn't really meant to be used out of the box; its more of a demonstration. Several things in the makefile would need to be changed in order to get this to work and build.

Prerequisites

• arm-none-eabi and arm-none-eabi-binutils as they are called on Archlinux. More generally, arm-none-eabi-gcc, arm-none-eabi-as, arm-none-eabi-ar, arm-none-eabi-ld, arm-none-eabi-objcopy, arm-none-eabi-size, and arm-none-eabi-objdump should be available for use. These don't necessarily need to be installed globally, but I did.
• Make. This does use a Makefile, so some sort of Make utility needs to be available to run it.

Brief desription of some Makefile variables

Some variables may need to be tweaked. The foremost among these will be listed. There are lots of comments in the Makefile which should hopefully describe the rest of the variables.

PROJECT: This is the name of the output files. These will be placed in the $(OUTPUTDIR) directory. They will be generated as $(PROJECT).elf, $(PROJECT).bin, $(PROJECT).hex, etc.

TEENSY3X_BASEPATH = $(HOME)/arduino-1.0.5/hardware/teensy/cores/teensy3: This variable points to the Teensyduino installation path for the Teensy3. On my machine, this in in my home directory, but on machines with a global installation of the Arduino IDE, this will need to be changed.

TOOLPATH = /usr: This is the "base directory" for the installation of the arm-none-eabi build toolchain. In my case, I had a global installation of this and so the base directory was my /usr directory. Whatever this directory is, it is expected that there is a bin directory containing the arm-none-eabi binaries and an arm-eabi-none/include directory containing the gcc include files.