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eVic SDK is a software development kit for writing APROMs for the Joyetech eVic VTC Mini.

Setting up the environment

To use evic-sdk, you need a working arm-none-eabi GCC toolchain, binutils and libc. On Linux, most distros have precompiled packages in their repos. For example, on Fedora, install the following packages:

arm-none-eabi-gcc
arm-none-eabi-newlib

On Ubuntu, the following should be enough:

gcc-arm-none-eabi
libnewlib-arm-none-eabi

On OSX you can use brew:

brew tap mpaw/arm-none-eabi
brew update
brew install gcc-arm-none-eabi

On Windows, first install the precompiled ARM toolchain. Choose an installation path without spaces to avoid problems with the build process. If you already have a working Windows make and git along with standard GNU utilities you can go ahead, but make sure those binaries are in your PATH. Otherwise, install Cygwin and add the following packages on top of the base install:

make
git

On any OS, you also need a working python-evic install. If you experience problems with hidapi, you can flash using the official updater. The conversion utilies needed by the SDK will work anyway.

Installing python-evic on Cygwin

On Cygwin, hidapi (needed by python-evic) won't build as-is. There are various issues (Cygwin not recognized as a target, DLL naming conflict, HID open permissions). You have two options: you can install python-evic just for the conversion part which doesn't require hidapi and use the official updater for flashing, or patch hidapi to make it work on Cygwin. In either case, you need to install python-evic in the first place:

  1. Install the following Cygwin packages:

    python3
python3-setuptools

  2. Download and install python-evic:

    git clone https://github.com/Ban3/python-evic
cd python-evic
python3 setup.py install

If you want to patch hidapi to get flashing functionality from python-evic, follow those instructions:

  1. Install the following Cygwin packages:

    binutils
gcc-core
gcc-g++
libhidapi0
libhidapi-devel
libusb1.0
libusb1.0-devel
wget
patch

  2. Download, patch and install hidapi:

    wget https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/h/hidapi/hidapi-0.7.99.post12.tar.gz
wget http://pastebin.com/raw/16E7UdNF && echo >> 16E7UdNF
tar -zxvf hidapi-0.7.99.post12.tar.gz
patch -s -p0 < 16E7UdNF
cd hidapi-0.7.99.post12
python3 setup.py install

Installation

  1. Clone this repository:

    git clone https://github.com/ReservedField/evic-sdk.git
cd evic-sdk

  2. Download the latest M451 series SDK from Nuvoton and copy the Library folder inside evic-sdk/nuvoton-sdk, as to have evic-sdk/nuvoton-sdk/Library.

  3. Point the EVICSDK environment variable to the evic-sdk folder. For example, if you're using bash and are in the SDK directory:

    echo "export EVICSDK=$(pwd)" >> $HOME/.bashrc

    Make sure to restart your terminal to ensure variables are set before building.

  4. Build the SDK:

    make

Building your first APROM

The helloworld example should be the first thing you try compiling and flashing, to check that everything is working correctly. Build it like:

cd example/helloworld
make

If the build succeeds, you should now have a bin/rel/DEVICE/helloworld.bin file ready to flash. This file is encrypted and compatible with the official updater.

Flashing

You can flash the output binary using the official updater. For development, using python-evic is quicker and simpler:

evic-usb upload bin/rel/DEVICE/helloworld.bin

If everything went well you should see the "Hello, World." message.

This APROM doesn't include USB updating, so you need to reboot to LDROM to flash something else. To do it, remove the battery and disconnect the USB cable. Then, holding the right button, connect the USB cable. Now you can let the button go and flash away. You can also insert the battery while the button is pressed, then let it go and connect the cable. I find powering over USB is more convenient (as long as the APROM doesn't require significant power, i.e. it doesn't fire the atomizer). Similiarly, holding the left button during powerup will force the system to boot from APROM.

Unless you're messing with the LDROM, this is practically unbrickable - you can always boot to LDROM and restore. Actually, APROM update is always done from LDROM: the official APROM reboots to LDROM and flashing happens from there.

The build system

The build system, used both by the SDK and APROMs, works around specifiers. A specifier is a string in the form device-flavor, where device is a supported device and flavor is a build flavor.

Supported devices:

  • evic: Joyetech eVic VTC Mini
  • vtwom: Joyetech eVic VTwo Mini
  • all: all of the above

Build flavors:

  • dbg: debug build
  • rel: release build
  • all: all of the above

See below for the differences between debug and release builds. The all-all specifier is also aliased to all. There are two classes of make targets:

  • specifier: performs a build for the specified device and flavor
  • clean-specifier: cleans the build for the specified device and flavor

Some examples (if more than one command is given, they are alternatives):

# Build everything
make all
make all-all
# Clean everything
make clean-all
make clean-all-all
# Build for eVic VTC Mini, debug flavor
make evic-dbg
# Build for eVic VTC Mini, all flavors
make evic-all
# Clean for eVic VTC Mini, release flavor
make clean-evic-rel
# Build for all devices, release flavor
make all-rel
# Clean for all devices, debug flavor
make clean-all-dbg
# Mix & match
make all-rel evic-dbg

Default targets

While the specifier system lets you specify exactly what you want, it can feel too verbose for day-to-day development. For this reason, the build system accepts two environment variables:

  • EVICSDK_MAKE_DEFAULT_DEVICE: default device(s)
  • EVICSDK_MAKE_DEFAULT_FLAVOR: default flavor(s)

Those can be set to a single device/flavor or to a list of them (for example, default flavors dbg rel and all are the same). You can omit the device, the flavor or both from any specifier and they will be filled in from those variables. Unset or empty variables default to all. The empty target is also aliased to def. Some examples:

# Build for default device(s) and flavor(s)
make
make def
# Clean for default device(s) and flavor(s)
make clean
# Build for default device(s), debug flavor
make dbg
# Build for eVic VTC Mini, default flavor(s)
make evic
# Clean for default devices(s), release flavor
make clean-rel

If you're writing scripts around the build system don't assume the user's defaults and use the full specifiers (unless you actually want to use the user's defaults).

Object files

Objects files for a specific device and flavor live in the obj/FLAVOR/DEVICE directory. The source tree is replicated in there, to avoid conflicts between files with the same name. If you wanted to compile the file src/foo/bar.c for an eVic VTC Mini, debug flavor, you could issue make obj/dbg/evic/src/foo/bar.o.

Source dependency files

Source dependency files live in the same directory as object files. They have a .d extension and are generated automatically when objects are built.

SDK builds

SDK output files live in the lib/FLAVOR/DEVICE directory. Debug builds enable debug info generation from the compiler and a fault handler that will display crash and register info, which can be decoded using the script in tools/fault-decode.

You can generate Doxygen documentation (doc directory) for the SDK using make docs. To clean it use make clean-docs.

APROM builds

APROM output files live in the bin/FLAVOR/DEVICE directory. The standard Makefile for APROMs follows this scheme:

TARGET = helloworld
OBJS = main.o
include $(EVICSDK)/make/Base.mk

TARGET is the base name for outputs. OBJS is a list of objects to be built. Notice that, even though objects live in obj/FLAVOR/DEVICE, the object list is written as if they were in the same directory as the sources. For example, src/foo/bar.c would appear as src/foo/bar.o in the list. This is done so that you can let the build system worry about devices and flavors (and to preserve compatibility with Makefiles written for the old build system). Since the source tree is replicated for the objects, always use relative paths without .. components (you can't have sources at a higher level than the Makefile). Finally, make/Base.mk has to be included (after setting those variables). See the top of make/Base.mk for more variables you can use.

The main output is bin/FLAVOR/DEVICE/TARGET.bin, which is an encrypted binary compatible with the official updater. Debug builds enable debug info generation from the compiler and generate some additional outputs:

  • bin/dbg/DEVICE/TARGET.elf: ELF output from compilation
  • bin/dbg/DEVICE/TARGET_dec.bin: unencrypted binary
  • bin/dbg/DEVICE/TARGET.map: linker map

Also, they are built against the debug SDK, so the fault handler is enabled. All the outputs except the linker map are targets (so you could make bin/dbg/DEVICE/TARGET.elf, for example).

Note that APROMs for a certain device and flavor combination are built against the SDK for that same device and flavor, so you'll need to have that SDK built for it to succeed. If you see linker errors about missing evicsdk-crt0.o, -levicsdk or -lnuvosdk, or you get No SDK found for DEVICE-FLAVOR, chances are you don't have the needed SDK built.

Parallel make

Parallel make (-j option) is supported and works as you would expect. However, problems can arise when you mix build and clean targets. For example, a default rebuild can be performed with make clean && make. For single-threaded make this could be shortened to make clean def, because targets will be made one at a time from left to right. With parallel make you will need to use the full form because the two targets would likely be made concurrently, breaking the build. Of course, mixing multiple build targets or multiple clean targets poses no issues.

Clang support

Clang is supported: just build with CC=clang make. At the moment, the support still depends on arm-none-eabi GCC for some standard headers and libraries. It will also generate a fair amount of warnings for SDK builds. On Cygwin Clang is assumed to be compiled for Cygwin and not for Windows (e.g. downloaded via the Cygwin package manager).

C++ support

C++ is supported, just name your sources with .cpp extensions. The C++ standard library is not supported. Exception handling and RTTI are disabled. It's more like C with classes than C++. You'll need to have arm-none-eabi-g++ installed to compile C++ code (even if you use Clang - we still need GCC's headers).

Legacy clean

If you're migrating from the old build system to the new one you'll probably want to get rid of the old cruft. Aside from running make clean with an old SDK, you can do it manually:

  • For the SDK, remove the lib directory and all .o files (recursively).
  • For APROMs, remove the bin directory and all .o files (recursively).

Misc

The following environment/make variables are available:

  • EVICSDK_MAKE_DEBUG: set to non-empty to enable extra debug output from the build system. Useful when investigating or reporting bugs.
  • EVICSDK_FPU_DISABLE: set to non-empty to disable FPU support and lazy stacking. Needs a full rebuild to avoid mixing FPU and no-FPU objects. Can be useful when debugging very rare, tricky FP bugs. Do not use this unless you fully understand what it means (no, it won't make you binaries smaller or faster, even if you don't use the FPU).

Thread/ISR safety

Unless otherwise specified by the documentation, SDK functions are thread-safe and ISR-safe. A function is thread-safe when it can be used concurrently by multiple threads. ISR-safety, on the other hand, is not strictly about interrupt concurrency: it means that the function can be called from ISR/callback contexts. Don't call non ISR-safe functions from these contexts.

Reporting bugs

I invite you to report bugs using the Issues page. Please confirm the bug against the latest SDK commit and include all information needed to reproduce the bug, like:

  • OS, make/compiler/binutils/newlib versions;
  • Head commit and branch of the SDK you're using;
  • Device and flavor (does it happen in release builds? Debug? Both?);
  • Code (if applicable), preferably reduced to a Minimal, Complete and Verifiable (MCV) example;
  • Things you tried and didn't work;
  • For crashes, the crash dump generated by a debug build;
  • For build system bugs, the debug output (i.e. EVICSDK_MAKE_DEBUG=1 make ...). Try minimizing it: if make evic-dbg is enough to make it happen, don't send output for make all.

Of course if you've already identified the bug in the SDK code you don't need to include as much information. Be sensible and everyone involved will be happy.

Pull requests

Pull requests are welcome. A few rules:

  • Respect the coding and documentation style of the SDK and refer to the tips & tricks.
  • PRs must merge cleanly against the branch they target (preferably rebased on top of the latest head for that branch).
  • No useless commits. Multiple related commits in the same PR are okay, but no merge/revert commits and no "Add foo" "Fix foo" "Fix foo again" stuff. Familiarize yourself with git rebase [-i] and use it.
  • Respect the commit message style (look at the history). The title should tell what the effect of a commit is, not how it does it. Titles should be imperative: "Add foo", not "Adds foo". For non-trivial commits you're welcome to add further technical details in the commit body. Stick to 80 columns per row.
  • If you're fixing a bug reference it in the title. If you're fixing a bug that hasn't been reported yet, create an issue first and reference it in your commit title (you don't need to wait for an answer on the issue - go ahead with the PR).

It is understood that big or complex changes often won't be perfect, no need to worry about it. Again, just use common sense and everything will work out.

USB debugging

The SDK provides a working CDC-compliant USB virtual COM port driver. This allows you to communicate with a computer for debugging purposes. On Linux and Mac it's plug-and-play. On Windows, you have to create an INF file with the virtual COM VID/PID pair to get it to install the driver. An example can be found in the Nuvoton SDK, under SampleCode/StdDriver/USBD_VCOM_SinglePort/Windows Driver.

An example on how to use the port is given in example/usbdebug. You can communicate with it using your favorite serial port terminal. All the line coding parameters (baud rate, parity, stop bits, data bits) are ignored, so you don't need to worry about them.

Tips & tricks

While the SDK does a fairly good job of abstracting the low-level details, you still need to remember that you're coding on an embedded platform. A few tips that might be helpful:

  • You should declare variables shared between threads or with callbacks/interrupts as volatile.
  • Resources are limited: be frugal. Write efficient code.
  • Minimize dynamic memory allocation: all memory not used by data or stack is assigned to heap, but RAM is only 32kB and nobody likes a failed malloc.
  • Declare constant data (such as lookup tables) as const: the compiler will place it in ROM, reducing RAM usage.
  • Prefer siprintf over sprintf, as it produces much smaller binaries by stripping out the floating point printing routines. Of course siprintf doesn't support floating point numbers, so if you need to print them and cannot use a fixed-point representation you'll have to live with the increased binary size.
  • When using floating point variables, prefer float over double, because float has hardware support. Using doubles will pull in some floating point emulation code, making your binaries larger.
  • When using standard floating point functions, prefer the ones with the f suffix: hardware support for floats means faster and smaller binaries. If you use double functions, they'll pull in tons of floating point emulation code.