Toolchain installation on macOS

We recommend using the Contiki-NG Docker image for easy setup of a consistent development environment: doc:docker.

Alternatively, you can install the toolchains natively on your system. This page describes how to do so, for OS X.

Install development tools for Contiki-NG

Start by installing Xcode Command Line Utilities

$ xcode-select --install

This guide makes extensive usage of homebrew. If you don’t already have it, install it:

$ /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Using homebrew, install a bunch of helper tools, such as git, srecord, doxygen (to build the API documentation), mosquitto (to test Contiki-NG’s MQTT functionality), tuntap (for tunslip and to run native examples with networking), rlwrap (for shell history), python (python 3 for running scripts and pip).

$ brew install git srecord doxygen uncrustify ant mosquitto wget libmagic rlwrap python
$ brew tap caskroom/cask
$ brew cask install tuntap

Install some python packages

Those are used/needed by some of the Contiki-NG python scripts.

$ pip install intelhex pyserial python-magic

Install the ARM GCC toolchain

An ARM compiler is needed to compile for ARM-based platforms.

Using homebrew

You can install the arm-gcc toolchain using homebrew.

# to tap the repository
$ brew tap contiki-ng/contiki-ng-arm
# to install the toolchain
$ brew install contiki-ng-arm-gcc-bin

This will automatically install the same version as the one currently installed in the docker image and used by our travis CI tests.

The formula itself is hosted under contiki-ng/homebrew-contiki-ng-arm

Manual Installation

You should download the toolchain from https://developer.arm.com/open-source/gnu-toolchain/gnu-rm/downloads or you can grab an older version from launchpad.net.

$ wget https://launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded/5.0/5-2015-q4-major/+download/gcc-arm-none-eabi-5_2-2015q4-20151219-mac.tar.bz2
$ tar jxf gcc-arm-none-eabi-5_2-2015q4-20151219-mac.tar.bz2

This will create a directory named gcc-arm-none-eabi-5_2-2015q4 in your current working dir. Add <working-directory>/gcc-arm-none-eabi-5_2-2015q4/bin to your path.

You can also try using the latest version, but be prepared to get compilation warnings and/or errors.

Install the MSP430 toolchain

The best way to achieve this on OS X is through homebrew, using a formula provided in a tap. Follow the instructions here: https://github.com/tgtakaoka/homebrew-mspgcc

Installing JN compiler

Untested on OS X, but start by reading the JN page for instruction on setting up the JN compiler: Set up JN516x

Installing NRF sdk

To get the NRF52dk platform to work you will need two things:

The ARM GCC toolchain (If you have installed it by following the steps above, you don’t need to do anything extra).
The Nordic SDK, see Platform-nrf52dk.

Install Java JDK for the Cooja network simulator

Nothing exciting here, just download and install Java for OSX. You will need the JDK 8, not just the runtime.

Then, install ant.

$ brew install ant

Note Cooja doesn’t work with JDK 9 since it uses a deprecated API, javax.xml.bind.DatatypeConverter, by JDK 9.

Install a CoAP client (libcoap)

Optionally and if you want to use CoAP examples, you can install the CoAP client distributed with libcoap.

Firstly you will need the following packages:

automake
autoconf
libtool
pkg-config

They can be installed with homebrew:

$ brew install automake pkg-config libtool autoconf

Then clone libcoap, compile and build it:

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/obgm/libcoap.git
$ cd libcoap/
$ ./autogen.sh 
$ ./configure --disable-doxygen --disable-documentation --disable-shared
$ make
$ make install

This will install coap-client under /usr/local/bin

$ coap-client 
coap-client v4.2.0alpha -- a small CoAP implementation
(c) 2010-2015 Olaf Bergmann <bergmann@tzi.org>

usage: coap-client [-A type...] [-t type] [-b [num,]size] [-B seconds] [-e text]
		[-m method] [-N] [-o file] [-P addr[:port]] [-p port]
		[-s duration] [-O num,text] [-T string] [-v num] [-a addr] [-U]

		[-u user] [-k key] [-r] URI
[...]

Clone Contiki-NG

$ git clone https://github.com/contiki-ng/contiki-ng.git
$ cd contiki-ng
$ git submodule update --init --recursive

Note: we recommend cloning and then initializing the submodules rather than using git clone --recursive. The latter results in submodules that use absolute paths to the top-level git, rather than relative paths, which are more flexible for a number of reasons.