I’ve been playing with RAK811 LoRa GPS tracker last week-end and earlier this week, and Rak Wireless provides open source firmware for the board that can be work on with Arm Keil or Coocox CoIDE tools. The former requires registration, and the latter is freeware and appears to be preferred by Rakwireless guys.
The only problem is that CooCox website have been down for several days, so I could not download the IDE from the official website. So instead I downloaded it from Softpedia together with a GCC toolchain. Sadly the version in Softpedia and the toolchain are outdated, so the firmware won’t build.
I had installed CooCox CoIDE v 1.7.8 with GNU Tools ARM Embedded 4.7 2013q. Rakwireless engineers informed me they used CoIDE v 2.0.6 with gcc-arm-none-eabi-5_4-2016q3-20160926-win32. I could not find it online, so they added both to their RAK811 documentation. You’ll find the two files under Tools: CoIDE-V2Beta-20170117.exe and gcc-arm-none-eabi-5_4-2016q3-20160926-win32.exe.
But again, it took me a few hours to download CoIDE since Rak server is based in China. Once the toolchain and IDE are installed, we can setup the toolchain path in Project->Select Toolchain Path.
Now let’s try to see if we can build the project with the updated CooCox CoIDE and GNU GCC toolchain.
Success! There’s also a mirror with both CooCox CoIDE v2.6 and gcc-arm-none-eabi-5_4-2016q3-20160926-win32.exe on MEGA.nz which should allow for faster downloads in most place.
That’s all good for CooCox CoIDE since AFAIK a recent version is not available anywhere else, but for the GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain, it might be even better to download it directly from Arm. The latest version is gcc-arm-none-eabi-7-2018-q2. So I installed it, updated the toolchain in CoIDE, and I could still build the project.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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