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Tools and accounts

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Tools

The tools you need for Device Management Client development:

Tool Comments
For Mbed OS - follow the respective Mbed OS tool chain recommendations.

For other Operating Systems - either the compiler provided in the SDK or GCC.		 Client code itself is generic C/C++ and as such has no special compiler requirements.
Serial terminal, such as:
* Picocom
* Minicom
* PuTTY
* TeraTerm		 In Linux, you can install Picocom and Minicom using the package manager, for example sudo apt-get install picocom.
git v2.7 or higher Installed with the Mbed CLI Windows installer.
In Linux sudo apt-get install git.
If you are starting with git, please configure it.
Python 3.6 or higher,
and the Python modules requests and click		 Installed with the Mbed CLI Windows installer.
In Linux, sudo apt-get install python,

For Python modules: get pip and
then sudo -H pip install requests click
(in Windows just pip install requests click).
Python virtual environment Strongly recommended.
Mbed CLI, follow Mbed OS recommendation. The Mbed OS development command line tool. Also install the Python dependencies in requirements.txt located under Mbed OS for the version of Mbed OS you are currently using.
Mercurial Installed with the Mbed CLI Windows installer
In Linux sudo apt-get install hg.
Windows serial driver - A serial driver for Windows versions earlier than 10. Installed with the Mbed CLI Windows installer.
Make 4.1 or later. For Ubuntu this is part of build-essentials package.
CMake 3.5 or later.
pal-platform is used for deploying external dependencies and compilation with CMake. Install the python dependencies in requirements.txt located under example application.
Manifest tool Part of Mbed OS requirements.txt. For other platforms installed via pip install manifest-tool.

For the Linux target builds, you must also define the environment variable which specifies where the cross-compiler toolchain is installed.

For example:

export GCC_DIR="/opt/bin/<your gcc arm compiler path>/bin"

Notes for Mbed CLI

The development tool for Device Management applications is Mbed CLI, and you need to install it to run tutorials, or to do your own development.

If you are using Windows, you can install Mbed CLI along with all of its dependencies with Mbed OS Windows installer. See Mbed CLI documentation for most recent download links.

If you are not using Windows, or if you prefer a manual Windows installation, see the installation instructions, or follow the process shown in our Windows video tutorial.

Notes for toolchains

GNU Arm GCC

You can download it at GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain. If you used the Windows Mbed CLI installer, you should already have GNU up and running.

For compiling with GCC, use the Arm GCC standalone compiler: arm-none-eabi-gcc.

Installing the GNU Arm GCC compiler

On Windows

  1. Download the compiler installer (.exe) version 6.x. Any of the three Windows files is acceptable.
  2. Install the compiler following the instructions on the installer wizard.

On Mac OS X and Linux

  1. Download the OSX or Linux version 6.x of the tarball.

  2. Decompress the tarball to your any location, for example /usr/local. If you don't have sudo permissions, you can decompress to your user folder. For example:

    tar -xvjf /tmp/gcc-arm-none-eabi-6-xxx.tar.bz2 -C ~/

  3. Add the GCC toolchain bin folder to your PATH. For example, you can add the following line to the file ~/.bash_profile (create the file if doesn't exist):

    export PATH="$PATH:~/<gcc-arm-none-eabi-6-xxx>/bin"

    Note: Alternatively, you can run this command to set up the path in the current shell.

You can use a virtual environment to install tools and run tutorials. This keeps the tools dependencies isolated from the rest of your environment, so you can have more than one version installed at a time.

Installation considerations

When using a virtual environment:

  • Install pip components only in your virtual environments.
  • Do not install components globally.
  • Separate Python tools to their own virtual environment to avoid any dependency conflicts.

Tip: These examples are for an sh shell, such as the shell found in Linux, Mac OS X, or the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

  1. Install the virtual environment:

    pip install virtualenv

  2. Change the location of the virtual environment:

    mkdir -p ~/virtualenvs
virtualenv ~/virtualenvs/manifest-tool

  3. Activate the virtual environment:

    source ~/virtualenvs/manifest-tool/bin/activate
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