This is the documentation for the latest (main) development branch of mcuxpresso sdk. If you are looking for the documentation of previous releases, use the drop-down menu on the left and select the desired version.

Installation

NOTE

If the installation instruction asks/selects whether to have the tool installation path be added to the PATH variable, please agree/select the choice. This ensures the tool can be used in any terminal in any path. After each tool installation, please verify the installation.

Basic tools

Git

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. For installation, you could visit the official Git website, download the appropriate version(you may use the latest one) for your operating system (Windows, macOS, Linux). Then run the installer and follow the installation instructions.

User git --version to check the version if you have a version installed.

Then configure your username and email using below commands:

git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "youremail@example.com"

Python

Install python 3.10 or above, please follow the guideline at Python Download.

Use python --version to check the version if you have a version installed.

West

# Note: you can add option '--default-timeout=1000' if you meet connection issue. Or you may set a different source using option '-i'.
# for example, in China you could try: pip install west>=1.2.0 -i https://pypi.tuna.tsinghua.edu.cn/simple
pip install west>=1.2.0

Build System

Cmake

Follow the CMake doc to install CMake. The minimum version is 3.30.0.

Use cmake --version to check the version if you have a versio installed.

Ninja

Install the Ninja. Please use the ninja version equal or greater than 1.12.1.

Use ninja --version to check the version if you have a version installed.

Kconfig

Kconfig is installed during python library installation

Ruby - Optional

If you don’t need GUI based IAR/MDK project, skip this step.

Install ruby for GUI project generation and standalone project generation. Follow the guide here ruby installation.

Compiler

If you don’t need to evaluate a specific compiler, you can skip that step.

ARMGCC

Download and install ARMGCC from Arm GNU Toolchain Downloads

IAR

Download and install IAR toolchain IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM

MDK

Download and install MDK toolchain MDK.

Codewarrior

Download and install CodeWarrior toolchain from NXP CodeWarrior.

Follow the installation instructions provided on the website. Ensure that the installation path is added to the PATH environment variable to use the toolchain from any terminal.

Environment Variables

Toolchain

Environment variable

Example

Cmd Line Argument

IAR

IAR_DIR

C:\iar for Windows OR /opt/iarsystems/bxarm-9.40.2 for Linux

–toolchain iar

MDK

MDK_DIR

C:\Keil_v5 for Windows OR /usr/local/ArmCompilerforEmbedded6.21 for Linux

–toolchain mdk

MDK

ARMCLANG_DIR

C:\ArmCompilerforEmbedded6.22 for Windows OR /usr/local/ArmCompilerforEmbedded6.21 for Linux

–toolchain mdk

Armgcc

ARMGCC_DIR

C:\armgcc

–toolchain armgcc(default)

CodeWarrior

CW_DIR

C:\Freescale\CW MCU v11.2

–toolchain codewarrior

Xtensa

XCC_DIR

C:\xtensa\XtDevTools\install\tools\RI-2023.11-win32\XtensaTools

–toolchain xtensa

Zephyr

ZEPHYR_SDK_INSTALL_DIR

–toolchain zephyr

  • For MDK toolchain, only armclang compiler is supported. There are 2 environment variables MDK_DIR and ARMCLANG_DIR for it. Since most Keil users will install MDK IDE instead of standalone armclang compiler, the MDK_DIR has higher priority than ARMCLANG_DIR.

  • For Xtensa toolchain, please set XTENSA_CORE environment, depends on your devices, it can be nxp_rt600_RI23_11_newlib or nxp_rt500_RI23_11_newlib and so on.

  • In Windows, the short path name is used in environment variables. If any toolchain is using the long path name, you can open a command window from the toolchain folder and use below command to get the short path name: for %i in (.) do echo %~fsi

Document Installation

It is only needed when you want to generate the HTML version of the document in your local environment

make

Install make for windows using choco, other OS has make installed by default. Ensure you are running command in administrator mode.

choco install make

If you do not have choco installed, you can install it from chocolatey

doxygen

The doxygen installation is needed if you want to try documentation generation. The versions for the doxygen tools are as below:

  • Doxygen version 1.8.13

  • Graphviz 2.43

  • Latexmk version 4.56

For installation, you can refer to the guideline as below, which is referenced from the Zephyr documentation generation guideline

  • Linux

    • On Ubuntu Linux:

      sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends doxygen graphviz librsvg2-bin \
texlive-latex-base texlive-latex-extra latexmk texlive-fonts-recommended imagemagick

    • On Fedora Linux:

      sudo dnf install doxygen graphviz texlive-latex latexmk \
texlive-collection-fontsrecommended librsvg2-tools ImageMagick

    • On Clear Linux:

      sudo swupd bundle-add texlive graphviz ImageMagick

    • On Arch Linux:

      sudo pacman -S graphviz doxygen librsvg texlive-core texlive-bin \
texlive-latexextra texlive-fontsextra imagemagick

  • macOS Use brew and tlmgr to install the tools:

    brew install doxygen graphviz mactex librsvg imagemagick

    tlmgr install latexmk

    tlmgr install collection-fontsrecommended

  • Windows Open a cmd.exe window as Administrator and run the following command:

    choco install doxygen.install graphviz strawberryperl miktex rsvg-convert imagemagick

.. _tool-installation-check:

Tool installation check

Once installed, open a terminal or command prompt and type the associated command to verify the installation.

If you see the version number, you have successfully installed the tool. Else please check whether the tool installation path be added into the PATH variable, if not, you could check the PATH variable add the tool installation path to the PATH with below commands:

  • Windows: Open command prompt or powershell, run below command to show the user PATH variable.

    reg query HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Environment /v PATH

    Assume the tool installation path is under C:\Users\xxx\AppData\Local\Programs\Git\cmd and the path is not seen in above result, you need to append the path value to the PATH variable with below command:

    reg add HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Environment /v PATH /d "%PATH%;C:\Users\xxx\AppData\Local\Programs\Git\cmd"

    Then close the command prompt or powershell and verify the tool command again.

  • Linux:

    1. Open the $HOME/.bashrc file using a text editor, such as vim.

    2. Go to the end of the file.

    3. Add the line which append the tool installation path to PATH variable and export PATH at the end of the file. For example, export PATH=”/Directory1:$PATH”

    4. Save and exit.

    5. Execute the script with source .bashrc or reboot the system to make the changes live. To verify the changes, run echo $PATH

  • macOS:

    1. Open the $HOME/.bash_profile file using a text editor, such as nano.

    2. Go to the end of the file.

    3. Add the line which append the tool installation path to PATH variable and export PATH at the end of the file. For example, export PATH=”/Directory1:$PATH”

    4. Save and exit.

    5. Execute the script with source .bash_profile or reboot the system to make the changes live. To verify the changes, run echo $PATH

Get MCUXpresso SDK Repo

To get the MCUXpresso SDK repository, use the west tool to clone the manifest repository and checkout all the west projects.

# Initialize west with the manifest repository
west init -m https://github.com/nxp-mcuxpresso/mcuxsdk-manifests/ mcuxpresso-sdk

# Update the west projects
cd mcuxpresso-sdk
west update

Install Python Dependency

To create a Python virtual environment in the west workspace core repo directory mcuxsdk, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to the core directory:

cd mcuxsdk

  1. [Optional] Create and activate the virtual environment:

If you don’t want to use the python virtual environment, skip this step.

python -m venv .venv

# For Linux/MacOS
source .venv/bin/activate

# For Windows
.\.venv\Scripts\activate
# If you are using powershell and see the issue that the activate script cannot be run.
# You may fix the issue by opening the powershell as administrator and run below command:
powershell Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
# then run above activate command again.

Once activated, your shell will be prefixed with (.venv). The virtual environment can be deactivated at any time by running deactivate command.

  1. Install the required Python packages:

# Note: you can add option '--default-timeout=1000' if you meet connection issue. Or you may set a different source using option '-i'.
# for example, in China you could try: pip3 install -r mcu-sdk-3.0/scripts/requirements.txt -i https://pypi.tuna.tsinghua.edu.cn/simple
pip install -r scripts/requirements.txt

Remember to activate the virtual environment every time you start working in this directory.

Document Python dependencies

There are several needed python packages for documentation generation, such as Sphinx tool, which we used to do the generation process. Run below command to install those python dependencies.

cd core/docs
pip install -r requirements.txt