Environment setup

This document describes how to prepare development environment for fobnail.

Building docker container

For the purpose of fobnail application development we have put necessary software into a single docker container which we called fobnail SDK. In order to build the container follow the steps below:

1. Install docker using the guide for Linux distribution present on your computer.
2. Add your user to docker group: sudo usermod -aG docker $USER. Then log out of the desktop session then log in again. This step is one-time only.
3. Clone the fobnail SDK repository:

   git clone https://github.com/fobnail/fobnail-sdk.git
   

4. Go to fobnail SDK directory: cd fobnail-sdk
5. Execute ./build.sh. It will build the container with following software available:
6. Rust 1.55.0
7. Cargo-embed: always the latest version available from Cargo registry

You will need fobnail-sdk to proceed with any work. The process will take a while to build the container. If we have built the container, time to verify it. We will build a sample application from the fobnail directory using the freshly built docker container. Follow the steps below to test the container:

1. git clone https://github.com/fobnail/nrf-hal
2. cd nrf-hal
3. Switch to blinky-demo-nrf52840 branch: git checkout blinky-demo-nrf52840
4. Start container: ./run-container.sh
5. Build a blinky application:

   cd examples/blinky-demo-nrf52840
   cargo build --target thumbv7em-none-eabihf
   

6. At the end of the process you should see something like this:

   Compiling blinky-demo-nrf52840 v0.1.0 (/home/build/nrf-hal/examples/blinky-demo-nrf52840)
   Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 1m 14s
   

Networking setup

You can build Fobnail firmware to run directly on your PC (see Developing firmware on PC for more information). In that case, Fobnail firmware needs a special network interface to communicate with the external world. You can create such an interface by executing the following commands:

$ sudo ip tuntap add fobnail0 mode tap user `whoami`
$ sudo ip addr add 169.254.0.8/16 dev fobnail0
$ sudo ip link set dev fobnail0 up

To make this persistent across reboots, you can use systemd-networkd, which ships with most distributions. To make the interface persistent, follow these steps:

• Create /etc/systemd/network/fobnail0.netdev.

[NetDev]
Name=fobnail0
Kind=tap

[Tap]
User=put your user name here

• Create /etc/systemd/network/fobnail0.network.

[Match]
Name=fobnail0

[Network]
Address=169.254.0.8/16
DHCPServer=false

• Enable systemd-networkd.

$ sudo systemctl enable --now systemd-networkd

You should see a new network interface created.

$ ip addr show dev fobnail0
40: fobnail0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state DOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 8e:36:f4:4c:98:28 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet6 fe80::8c36:f4ff:fe4c:9828/64 scope link
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

You should see the same interface inside Docker container.

$ docker run --rm -it --privileged --net=host 3mdeb/fobnail-sdk /bin/bash
(docker)$ ip link
40: fobnail0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state DOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 8e:36:f4:4c:98:28 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

Note: TAP interface passthrough may not work if your distro is using SELinux. If you can't see the network interface in Docker, try turning SELinux into permissive mode.

$ sudo setenforce 0

If you are using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) with Docker Desktop, interface passthrough won't work because Docker is located on a separate Virtual Machine. In that case, you can still use Fobnail SDK to build the firmware, but the firmware must be run from outside the container.