Installing uVision5

Computer programming involves specifying a sequence of binary codes that are interpreted by the machine as instructions that together enable it to undertake some task. The instruction sets of early computers were small and easily memorized by programmers, so programs were written directly in machine code, and each instruction code word was set up on switches and written to memory. Finally, once all the instructions had been entered, the program was executed. With the development of more powerful machines and larger instruction sets, this approach became unworkable. This motivated the need to program in higher level (human understandable) languages that are translated into machine code by a special program called a compiler. Modern day programmers rarely need to interpret individual binary codes; instead, they use a text editor to enter a sequence of high-level language statements, a compiler to convert them into machine code, a linker to allow programs to reuse previously written (library) code, and a loader to write the binary codes to memory. The steps comprising edit, compile, link, load can be undertaken by running each program (editor, compiler, linker, loader) separately. However, nowadays they are usually packaged together within a wrapper called an IDE. Some IDEs are language-specific and some are customizable, allowing developers to create bespoke programming environments for any target language and/or machine.

The pack installer framework allows MDK-ARM uVision5 to be customized and extended to target a large number of devices and evaluation boards using ARM cores. But while, IDEs represent the most popular and efficient route to programming, uVision represents just one of a number of IDEs that are widely available. Other manufacturers and open source communities offer alternatives, some of which we investigate later in the book.