Introduction

Hello and Welcome to the blog, CMake support for 96Boards WisTrio. This blog gives a quick summary of the recent CMake support added for WisTrio IoT board’s SDK to help building the firmware on Linux based systems using opensource tools.

WisTrio SDK

WisTrio is a 96Boards IoT board manufactured by RAK Wireless based on RAK811 LoRa module. We already added zephyr support for this board utilizing the STM32 MCU integrated in RAK811 module. But the SDK provided by RAK Wireless is based on the proprietary Keil IDE and it is not opensource developer friendly. So far there is no alternative build system exists for the SDK and that made life miserable for the open source developers who wish to use an open build system like CMake or Make.

CMake support

Much like other developers I also suffered from the lack of open build tool support for the WisTrio SDK. So, I decided to add one for my own use as well as for the community. Initially, I thought of adding plain Make utility support but that turned to be little bit tricky as the SDK involves a lot of configurations. Hence, I finally moved to CMake utility which seemed to be lot easier to work with. Even though I didn’t have much experience with CMake, there were lot of good tutorials available to help me.

After spending multiple evenings finally, I got the CMake support added to WisTrio SDK.

https://github.com/Mani-Sadhasivam/RAK5205-WisTrio-LoRa/tree/cmake

For flashing the binary, I used opensource stm32flash utility, which worked straight away.

Newlib-nano Floating point format specifier

Since the STM32 MCU used in the RAK811 module is very much resource constraint, I used the Newlib-nano library for saving code space. But that introduced some issue with printing the floating point numbers over UART. The firmware of the WisTrio SDK initializes the on-board sensors like LIS3DH and BME680 and prints its output over serial. Since the BME680 is an integrated sensor, it provides different numerical measurements like Temperature, Pressure, Humidity and Gas value. Printing those values requires the use of %f format specifier in the custom e_printf function.

The e_printf function internally uses the Newlib-nano’s vsnprintf function for building the output buffer based on user provided inputs and format specifiers.

#define MAX_MSG_LEN 127

static char ll_msg_buf_[MAX_MSG_LEN];

void e_printf(const char *format, ...)
{
    int i;
    va_list args;
    size_t len;

    /* Format the string */
    va_start(args, format);
    len = vsnprintf(ll_msg_buf_, MAX_MSG_LEN, &format[0], args);
    va_end(args);
    HAL_UART_Transmit(&UartContext[UART_1].UartHandle, (uint8_t *)&ll_msg_buf_, len, 0xFFFF);
}

This is where the issue came from. The default behaviour of the Newlib-Nano is to disable the %f format specifier for memory saving. So passing the floating point numbers (Soft float as there is no FPU support in Cortex-M3) displayed garbage over serial as the values were not formatted properly. After hovering over the issue for some time, I figured out that the issue was with Newlib-nano and found the solution. For enabling the floating point format specifier, the user has to pass -u _printf_float flag to the ARM GCC linker and once I added that flag, the floating point measurements were displayed over UART properly!

RAK5205_TrackerBoard software version:2.0.0.6
LIS3DH init success!
ACC X:0mg Y:-16mg Z:0mg
BME680 init success!
T: 36.46 degC, P: 983.82 hPa, H 49.26 %rH , G: 3863 ohms

Conclusion

Finally, the CMake support was working like a charm and I submitted a Pull Request to the mainline SDK repository so that other developers can also make use of it!

https://github.com/RAKWireless/RAK5205-WisTrio-LoRa/pull/11

This article is Part 2 in a 2-Part Series.