Written by Ian Ross
This blog originally ran on Ian’s website at Skybluetrades.net. For more content like this, click here.
Here, I’m going to try all this stuff using PlatformIO + Zephyr. Fortunately, Valerii Koval already wrote a tutorial about using Bluetooth on the nRF52840 in this setup, which you can read here! I’ll be looking in there for help with Bluetooth when we get to it.
What are PlatformIO and Zephyr? From the PlatformIO website: “PlatformIO is a cross-platform, cross-architecture, multiple framework, professional tool for embedded systems engineers and for software developers who write applications for embedded products.” And from the Zephyr website: “The Zephyr Project strives to deliver the best-in-class RTOS for connected resource-constrained devices, built be secure and safe.”
They are both what I think of as “maximalist” projects, aiming to support everything everywhere (or more or less). When I first saw them, I wasn’t so keen on this idea, but after thinking about it a bit, it’s grown on me more. For comparison with Zephyr, think of Linux. If you want an OS to run on any architecture with a paging MMU, you use Linux. It supports more or less all hardware you can think of (plus a lot you’ve never heard of), and it’s a sort of universal compilation target for that scale of system. Why not have something similar for smaller systems?
My initial objection was that the architectures at the smaller end are too variable, the peripherals are too variable, and the peripherals generally aren’t auto-discoverable like they are on larger architectures. But the variability argument doesn’t wash at all. Linux runs on everything from little ARM processors (and some people even squash it onto STM32s), up to IBM z/Architecture monsters and supercomputers. The variability in peripherals is just as huge. The non-discoverability argument is a little tougher, but adaptation of things like Linux’s devicetree system can work really well for smaller architectures (and that’s what Zephyr does).
PlatformIO takes all this one step further, integrating multiple toolchains across different platforms, manufactures, operating systems, APIs, etc. into a single relatively simple IDE front-end that helps with all the installation and configuration of SDKs. One of the platforms that it supports is Zephyr.
Sounds good. Let’s give it a whirl!
Installation
PlatformIO comes in two parts, a command line interface and an IDE. For most applications, you only need to install the IDE part, because you can get that to install the command line stuff for you later (you might need to install the command line tools separately for CI systems, for example). The PlatformIO IDE is based on Visual Studio Code instead of being a hand-rolled “new IDE”. Which I think is an excellent choice. Even if I’m not normally an IDE user, if there’s going to be an IDE, I would much rather it be an existing well-tested and well-liked one than something that some new untested, probably poorly designed IDE. There are plugins for other IDEs and editors, but let’s go with VS Code here.
Installation is simple:
- Install VS Code (from your OS package manager or by downloading from the VS Code site).
- In the VS Code Extension Manager, search for “PlatformIO IDE”.
- Press the green button! You need to wait a while as VS Code installs some dependencies it needs before downloading the main PlatformIO install.
- Restart VS Code and the PlatformIO bug logo will appear in the left-hand icon bar. You’re all set!
That’s remarkably easy. You end up with a 60 Mb ~/.platformio directory in your home directory, but that seems to be about all. PlatformIO downloads the other platform-dependent tools it needs as you request them, which means you don’t have to install everything right away. The first time you create a project for a new board, PlatformIO will download the board support package for the board. The first time you use a particular framework for a project (e.g. Zephyr), PlatformIO will download what’s needed.
After setting up a project using Zephyr for the nRF52840 development kit, the contents of the ~/.platformio directory have grown to 1.4Gb, but that includes a full GCC toolchain, other build tools, a full Zephyr distribution, plus a pile of other Zephyr-friendly libraries (including OpenThread). For what’s there, it doesn’t seem like too much.
Documentation
There’s a lot of documentation, though it’s quite hard to assess how much there is and how useful it is because it’s quite naturally split between documentation for the PlatformIO system and documentation for Zephyr.
After a bit of doing things with all this, the Zephyr documentation really doesn’t look too bad. Also, it’s relatively easy to spelunk in the Kconfig and devicetree files for the different boards that are supported to see how things are set up. All of these things end up under ~/.platformio/packages/framework-zephyr when you first set up a PlatformIO project using Zephyr.
One problem with Zephyr is just its size. Think of it as being comparable to Linux and you won’t go far wrong. It has APIs for everything, supports hundreds of boards and many MCU architectures. I can’t do it anything like justice in this sort of fly-by test. All I can say is that it looks like there’s enough documentation to be going on with, and there’s a lot of stuff in the Zephyr project. The core framework as downloaded by PlatformIO is about 1.5M lines of code (very roughly), then there are versions of other things packaged for use with Zephyr, like OpenThread, LVGL, mbedtls, and so on.
Example 1: Blinky (example-1)
One of the things that ends up being downloaded with the nRF52840 development kit BSP is some examples. You can find a Zephyr-based blinky example in ~/.platformio/platforms/nordicnrf52/examples/zephyr-blink. (There are also examples within the Zephyr framework directories.)
To get going, I created a new Zephyr project for the nRF52840 development kit in PlatformIO, then copied the contents of the src/main.c from that example into my project.
And then, you plug your nRF52840 development kit into a USB port and you choose one of the “Run” options from the “Debug” menu and PlatformIO:
- downloads the SEGGER J-Link tools,
- compiles your code and the Zephyr library,
- links everything for the nRF52840 development kit,
- flashes the result to the board and
- drops into the debugger at the top of your
mainfunction.
It just works, with no messing around required at all. Fantastic stuff!
Example 2: PWM blinky
Pre-defined example (example-2a)
There is a pre-defined PWM blinky example in the Zephyr distribution, which can be found in ~/.platformio/packages/framework-zephyr/samples/basic/blinky_pwm. Getting this to work with PlatformIO looks like a useful thing to do, since it uses the Zephyr Kconfig-based configuration system to switch on PWM support.
This ended up being a little bit confusing. Initially, I just copied the source code from the Zephyr example into a new PlatformIO project set up to use Zephyr on the nRF52840 development kit, and the code appeared to build without any problems at all, even though there wasn’t any additional Zephyr configuration set up (which usually goes in a prj.conf file). But when I tried uploading the code to the nRF52840 board with VS Code’s built-in debugger, I got a bunch of weird compilation errors. After some messing around (manually deleting .pio directories, setting up the necessary zephyr/prj.conf file which really was needed, rebuilding from scratch), I got something working.
I’m sure this would all be easier if I wasn’t also a complete beginner at using VS Code. I really do want to like it, but I’m not getting there yet. The problems with it are basically the same as you get in any of these “integrated all the things” environments, where details are hidden and hard to discover. PlatformIO has a build tool called pio, Zephyr has a build tool called west, and they all run inside of VS Code when you press some buttons. It’s all a bit undiscoverable. At least if you have makefiles, even if the person who wrote the makefiles is a sadistic idiot, you can eventually track down what’s doing what. I find that much harder to do in these integrated environments.
Also, two extra niggles. First, the serial monitor in VS Code doesn’t seem to understand ANSI terminal control sequences. Some of the Nordic libraries use these in their debug output, and they get a bit mangled in the VS Code terminal. I think I’ll stick to Minicom there. Second, the serial debugging doesn’t work by default: you need to create a prj.conf file with it set up, and you need to configure the serial monitor speed in the platformio.ini file. These seem like things that should be set up by default.
Anyway, after a bit of hassle there was some PWM action going on.
Add PWM to basic blinky (example-2b)
Next thing is to make a copy of the basic blinky and try to make it into a PWM blinky.
First step: add some debug output to the blinky code using Zephyr’s printk function. That means setting up the necessary prj.conf things to make that work. In a standalone Zephyr installation, you can use the usual Kconfig user interfaces to do this (you do something like west build -t guiconfig, for example). Unfortunately, PlatformIO doesn’t allow you to do this. There’s no support for the Kconfig tools, and it appears that the way that the PlatformIO build directories are arranged means that you can’t even get around it by using a lower-level approach (which is running the Ninja build tool after the main Zephyr build process has built some stuff for you first).
That is, to be honest, a very serious disappointment. The Kconfig-based approach to system configuration in Zephyr is one of its biggest selling points for me, and the easy discoverability of configuration settings that you get from the menuconfig and guiconfig tools is a huge win. Losing that is a bit of a blow, since it means you have to go fossicking through hundreds of Kconfig files to work out what options are available and how to switch them on. (Not kidding about the “hundreds”: there are actually 1540 Kconfig files under the ~/.platformio directory in my installation right now!)
Still, let’s press on. You need to add something like the following to prj.conf to make printk work within VS Code:
CONFIG_PRINTK=y CONFIG_STDOUT_CONSOLE=y CONFIG_LOG=y
Incidentally, this is another thing I’m not completely convinced by with this kind of integrated environment: where exactly is that printk output going? Is it coming over the SEGGER RTT link? Or is it going somewhere else? You can find out by some exploration in the Zephyr documentation to identify the relevant configuration options, and then by looking in the board configurations in the ~/.platformio/framework-zephyr tree. The file ~/.platformio/packages/framework-zephyr/boards/arm/nrf52840dk_nrf52840/nrf52840dk_nrf52840_defconfig defines USE_SEGGER_RTT=y, which causes log output to go the SEGGER RTT console. Not a completely obvious thing to have to do though.
That file is handy to look into anyway, since it tells you what Kconfig things you don’t need to set up because they’re configured by default if you’re using the nRF52840 development kit. In the same directory is a devicetree definition for the board, which is also useful to see. It includes definitions that set things up so that only one (of four) PWM channels is connected to an LED output. I’m not sure what the other PWM channels are used for, or if there’s any way to access them from within Zephyr.
In any case, the code changes to make the blinky into a “soft fade” PWM blinky are fairly easy. The PWM blinky example from the Zephyr distribution uses a function called pwm_pin_set_usec to set the PWM duty cycle, but there’s also pwm_pin_set_nsec that takes the PWM period and on-time in nanoseconds, so it was possible to set up a 40 kHz PWM frequency and to get super-smooth fading.
The only configuration change needed to make it work is to add CONFIG_PWM=y to the prj.conf file.
That’s actually pretty good. And a lot of the pain with it can be put down to unfamiliarity with the platform, the tools, the IDE, the everything. Score one to Zephyr!
Example 3: BLE-controlled PWM blinky
So, PWM is basic stuff. Let’s see if we can do some Bluetooth.
Pre-defined BLE example (example-3a)
Let’s give an environmental sensing example from the Zephyr distribution a try. It’s in samples/bluetooth/peripheral_esp.
So, we make a new PlatformIO Zephyr project, copy in the main.c and prj.conf file from the example, hit “Build”, the hit “Upload” to deploy onto the nRF52840 development kit.
And it works! I can connect to the device using the Android nRF Connect Bluetooth debugging application, can see the attributes supported by the example, pull values, and so on.
That was almost disappointingly undramatic. The prj.conf file has 9 lines of Bluetooth-specific configuration information. The main.c application code is about 450 lines, and there’s nothing particularly surprising about it. There are some macros to define the attributes supported, then everything runs off of a few callbacks.
I think that this is now starting to get at the real benefit of Zephyr. All of the complexity of setting up Bluetooth on the nRF52840 is more or less gone. You only have to write code that corresponds to Bluetooth-level entities, and you don’t need to worry about dealing with the Nordic “SoftDevice” Bluetooth drivers at all. It’s nice.
BLE PWM blinky (example-3b)
One problem here was that the Bluetooth example I used as example-3a is for an environmental sensing service, not a UART service. The Zephyr Bluetooth library doesn’t seem to include a UART service at all, which is a little surprising. Even though the UART service is a Nordic custom service, it’s quite widely supported by other platforms (e.g. CircuitPython, and I think ARM mbed too).
What this means is that I had to take a different approach here to the other platforms I’ve been testing, and write a custom Bluetooth service with a single GATT characteristic for the PWM blinky duty cycle. This means that the two steps “Add BLE to PWM blinky (example-3b)” and “Add PWM blinky to BLE example (example-3c)” are folded into one here, which I’ve labelled as example-3b.
This effort was made a little more difficult by two factors:
- I don’t know a whole lot about Bluetooth. Basically just stuff I’ve picked up by reading example code during this project… I’d not done any Bluetooth work at all before starting this, so I don’t really know what I’m doing.
- The Zephyr documentation for their Bluetooth library isn’t all that good. This is kind of the flip side of the wide support for a lot of complex subsystems within Zephyr. It’s already a huge effort to get something like Zephyr going. To document everything in detail multiplies that effort by a non-trivial factor. That means that some areas just have sparse Doxygen-like documentation. The Bluetooth library has a set of macros for setting up GATT profiles, and it would have been useful to have some sort of tutorial documentation for how to use them. Instead I “guessed and messed”, based on the example code I found in the Zephyr install. (At least there’s a fair amount of example code!)
Point #1 here obviously neutralises any serious complaining I could do about point #2! I’ve not reviewed all of the Zephyr documentation, but it does seem to be a little uneven, which is not so surprising. Although Zephyr is aiming to be the “Linux of the embedded world”, it’s going to take some time for the standard of documentation to get up to the standard of the Linux kernel documentation (which is outstanding).
All that said, it wasn’t that difficult to get a basic Bluetooth custom service going. I had one minor wobble with getting the service advertising data right, but I think that was mostly down to unfamiliarity with Bluetooth, not any deficiency in Zephyr.
This was a good test of the ease of debugging in PlatformIO too. I wrote a very basic custom Bluetooth service with a single integer characteristic and read and write callbacks for that characteristic that just logged messages. Those messages are printed with Zephyr’s printk function, which goes to whatever debug console the system under test supports, and the messages appear in the PlatformIO’s serial monitor panel in VS Code. While that’s going on it’s also easy to single-step through things in the debugger, and because of the way that Zephyr builds work, all the Zephyr source that your project uses is directly available, debuggable and searchable. That’s very nice, and makes it easy to track problems down.
Once I got the advertising working, I could talk to the Bluetooth service using the Android nRF Connect application: I could read my custom characteristic and see a message appear in the PlatformIO serial monitor from the read callback, and so on.
Once things were at that point, it only took five minutes to incorporate the PWM blinky side of things to get a working application. That was really smooth.
Example 4: something “Almost Realistic” (example-4)
Here, we’re going to start from the Bluetooth PWM blinky example from above and add some extra functionality. We want this to do the following:
- Replicate the PWM blinky behaviour from
example-3b. - Do some calculations and publish the results via another Bluetooth characteristic. For the CircuitPython example I used calculating digits of π for this, but that’s not so convenient in this case, mostly because the Spigot algorithm for generating digits of π needs arbitrary precision integer arithmetic, and I don’t want to take the time to figure out how to cross-compile a suitable library to support that. Instead I’ll just write a simple thing to generate some sort of synthetic signal.
- When a button is pushed on the nRF52840 dev kit, toggle the digit generation and publication, and flash the PWM LED a few times for feedback.
This was relatively straightforward to do, starting from the example-3b code. I added a new GATT characteristic for the synthetic signal value, setting it up for live notifications, then I wrote a function to generate some synthetic signal values (just a superposition of a few sine waves). I ran the signal generator function in a separate thread (defined statically using Zephyr’s K_THREAD_DEFINE macro).
Once that was done, it took a little messing around to get live notifications working for the “signal” characteristic, but that was just because I didn’t know the right way to do it. I needed to add an extra definition in the GATT profile for the PWM service to mark that the the signal characteristic should support notifications (what’s called a “CCC” definition). Once that was in place, calling Zephyr’s bt_gatt_notify function whenever the signal value changed nicely pushed updates out over Bluetooth connections.
I then checked that the Bluetooth PWM duty cycle part of things still worked. Everything worked nicely, and it was possible to update the LED PWM duty cycle in parallel with the synthetic signal generation and publication.
Then I set up a basic interrupt handler and callback for a button press of one of the buttons on the nRF52840 development board. This worked more or less first time, apart from a weird thing with the dev board where I could trigger the button press just by bringing my finger near to the button, without even touching it! I added some switch debouncing logic to make that less of a problem.
The only thing remaining to do then was to write a little bit of code to do switch signal generation on and off when the button was pressed, and to replace the PWM LED output with a blinking indicator for a couple of seconds to give feedback that the signal generation state had changed. I did that using a separate thread, using a semaphore to wake the thread up from the button callback.
This all worked super smoothly. The Zephyr thread API isn’t quite like Posix threads (or FreeRTOS for that matter), but it’s easy to use and relatively obvious. I’ve been particularly impressed with how easy it’s been to do Bluetooth stuff with Zephyr. The Zephyr Bluetooth API is very usable, it’s easy to get going with it, but it still exposes all the details you might need to handle in more complex applications.
The judging criteria
Installation
How easy is it to install the platform?
Installation is easy if you use VS Code, because the whole of PlatformIO can be installed as a VS Code extension. Once that’s done, PlatformIO downloads and installs packages and libraries as needed when you use them in a build. It’s very convenient.
Is the download ridiculously large? How much disk space do you need?
After getting to the end of Example 3, i.e. having everything in place to be able to do Bluetooth things, there was a little less than 2 Gb in my ~/.platformio directory. That doesn’t seem too bad. Like all these things, it includes a full GCC toolchain as well as all the source code for Zephyr, tools like the SEGGER J-Link utilities, and so on. These self-contained installs might not be the most efficient thing for disk space, but they make life a lot simpler than trying to do everything with operating system packages.
Does it work on Linux? Windows? MacOS? Any weird restrictions?
Yes, yes and yes, I think. PlatformIO claims to be cross-platform, and I have no reason to disbelieve that, since it’s based on VS Code. Zephyr is just a set of C libraries that you cross-compile, so if your cross-compiler toolchain works, you should be golden.
Is it free?
Yes. PlatformIO is free and open-source, as is Zephyr.
Quick start
How long is “Zero To Blinky”?
Not very long at all.
Are there enough examples?
There are lots of examples.
Does stuff just work?
Mostly, as far as I could tell from my testing. The only places where you have to make special effort are the places where Zephyr support is still thin, or where the documentation is lacking. I’m sure those will get better with time.
Documentation
Is there any?
There is.
Is there enough?
Nope. If Zephyr really is going to be “the Linux of the embedded world”, it needs the same standards of documentation as Linux has. And those standards are very high.
Is it any good? (i.e. not just Doxygen…)
A lot of it is unfortunately just Doxygen documentation, often with nothing to connect the Doxygen pages at all. Fortunately there are lots of examples, so you do have somewhere to get started.
Basic workflow
Edit
Is there editor syntax support?
There is. If you use VS Code, everything is already there for you. The PlatformIO website has information about using other editors and IDEs, but I didn’t do more than take a very quick look at Emacs support, so I can’t comment on that. (Emacs support for C and C++ programming is slightly complicated, so I didn’t want to get into it for this project.)
Do you have to use a specific IDE or can you use tools you’re already familiar with?
There is apparently support for other IDEs.
If you have to use a specific IDE, is it any good?
If I was going to switch from Emacs to an IDE, I would probably switch to VS Code. It’s really pretty good. The integration of flash programming, debugging and serial monitor is seamless.
Compile
How easy is setting up paths to headers and libraries?
Oh, let us compare the ways that life is better with Zephyr than with the nRF5 SDK. You just don’t need to do any of this stuff at all. Zephyr header files all live under a single include/ directory, so there’s no messing around with hundreds of include paths. It’s blissfully simple.
What are compiler error messages like?
It’s GCC. They’re good.
Flash
Basically, it just works.
Debug
This all seems good. It just works. I assume that the VS Code debugger talks to GDB behind the scenes, and uses the SEGGER J-Link GDB server to talk to the nRF52840 dev board, but you don’t see any of that. I don’t know how you’d work out what was going on if something went wrong, because the details are all hidden, but when it works, it works!
Fancy workflows
There’s a command line setup for PlatformIO that you can use to do CI builds and similar things. I’ve not tried it, but it looks like it’s possible. I’m not sure about any special setups for testing, but I think it ought to be easy enough to integrate things into PlatformIO builds.
Functionality
Coverage of device functionality
What device peripherals have driver libraries?
Quite a lot. Basically anything that is available on more than one platform has a driver abstraction in the Zephyr API (e.g. ADCs, DMA, PWM, Flash, serial interfaces, watchdogs, etc.). If you want to use something really weird, or use something in a very platform-specific way, you might need to break out of those APIs, but the coverage seems to be fairly comprehensive. (Now, I don’t know how well all of those APIs are implemented for different platforms, but the intent to cover them all is definitely there.)
A slightly more detailed investigation by looking through the devicetree definitions for the nRF52840 development board reveals some interesting things. (By the way, this is something that I think is one of Zephyr’s killer features. Using the Linux devicetree system and Kconfig for an embedded OS is a brilliant solution. The devicetree files, in particular, are gold: you can see exactly what system peripherals are exposed at the OS level.)
Anyway, if you do go exploring in Zephyr’s dts directory, and look at arm/nordic/nrf52840.dtsi, you can see exactly which peripherals are exposed as devicetree nodes (and so are accessible from Zephyr programs without any extra effort). So what do you get? Bascially, all the “normal” stuff: flash, ADCs, clock, timers, GPIOs, I2C, PWM, SPI, RTC, timers, UART, USB, plus some more nRF52-specific things, like the random number generator, quadrature decoder, temperature sensor, watchdog, and the cryptocell. You also get access to the generic ARM stuff like the NVIC and SysTick timer.
You don’t get direct access to some of the more exotic things on the nRF52840, like the some of the components used for cryptography for networking (the Accelerated Address Resolver, for instance). However, some of those components are used directly in higher-level drivers (as memory-mapped peripherals, without exposing them via the devicetree). The AAR is used in the Bluetooth subsystem, for example, which means you more or less never need to think about it.
It seems to me that there’s actually a good balance here, between peripherals and MCU subsystems that might be useful at an application level, and other subsystems that only make sense to use in the context of very specific contexts (like Bluetooth, for instance). For sure, you could dream up some weird way of using the AAR for another application if you wanted to, and if you were going to do that, you wouldn’t be happy with Zephyr hiding it from your behind the Bluetooth driver. But if you’re going to go as far off piste as that, you probably shouldn’t be expecting a conventional RTOS to help you much anyway!
Are those libraries easy to use?
Given that I got all the stuff described above working by sticking things together from examples and searching through the documentation, I’d say it’s not so hard to get it working.
Are there any options missing?
Of course. But mostly the restriction of options seems to be sensible. You get direct access via Zephyr APIs to the things that it makes sense to use in application code, and the other stuff is used in the right way in the right context in device drivers, and isn’t exposed via the devicetree.
If so, how easy is it to work around?
You can still use CMSIS or HAL libraries. In fact, a lot of the Zephyr subsystems are implemented using those things, so you can just pick them up out of the Zephyr source tree and knock yourself out.
Configuration
How easy is it to use different libraries or drivers in your code?
Oh, so easy. You need to have the right Kconfig flags set in your prj.conf, and that’s about it.
Are there any configuration or code generation tools to help with the setup?
This is about the only wart. Working with PlatformIO means you can’t use Zephyr’s Kconfig tools (the usual make menuconfig or make guiconfig) which hampers discoverability of configuration options. From reading around the PlatformIO issue tracker, I believe that this is in the works. Once you can fire off the Kconfig GUI from within PlatformIO, that will be sweet. In the meantime, you need to edit the prj.conf file by hand, which is a little annoying, but not an insurmountable problem.
Libraries
Are there higher-level libraries available for common functionality (e.g. communications, crypto, etc.)?
Lots and lots. Networking, audio, Bluetooth, crypto, data structures, file systems, threads and synchronisation, memory management, a command shell, abstractions for lots of peripheral types, plus lots more. Pretty much everything you’d need for most projects.
How easy is it to incorporate third-party code into your projects?
Yes. PlatformIO projects with Zephyr have a built-in mechanism for doing this.
Frustration
Basically: Did implementing the test programs make Ian angry?
No, it was a total breeze. Zephyr is really rather good. There’s a lot to learn, and I barely scratched the surface of what you can do with it here. I also took a fairly cargo cultish approach to writing some of the test programs here (especially the Bluetooth stuff), but it worked all the same. With a bit of study and some more understanding, Zephyr feels like it could be a seriously usable platform.
The documentation does need some work, but I’m comparing it to the Linux kernel documentation, which probably isn’t such a fair comparison!
