btstack/port/windows-h4-zephyr

BTstack Port for Windows Systems with Zephyr-based Controller

The main difference to the regular windows-h4 port is that that the Zephyr Contoller uses 1000000 as baud rate. In addition, the port defaults to use the fixed static address stored during production.

The port provides both a regular Makefile as well as a CMake build file. It uses native Win32 APIs for file access and does not require the Cygwin or mingw64 build/runtine. All examples can also be build with Visual Studio 2022 (e.g. Community Edition).

Prepare Zephyr Controller

Please follow this blog post about how to compile and flash samples/bluetooth/hci_uart to a connected nRF5 dev kit.

In short: you need to install an arm-none-eabi gcc toolchain and the nRF5x Command Line Tools incl. the J-Link drivers, checkout the Zephyr project, and flash an example project onto the chipset:

• Install J-Link Software and documentation pack.

• Get nrfjprog as part of the nRFx-Command-Line-Tools. Click on Downloads tab on the top and look for your OS.

• Checkout Zephyr and install toolchain. We recommend using the arm-non-eabi gcc binaries instead of compiling it yourself. At least on OS X, this failed for us.

• In samples/bluetooth/hci_uart, compile the firmware for nRF52 Dev Kit

  $ make BOARD=nrf52_pca10040

• Upload the firmware

  $ make flash

• For the nRF51 Dev Kit, use make BOARD=nrf51_pca10028.

Configure serial port

To set the serial port of your Zephyr Controller, you can either update config.device_name in main.c or always start the examples with the correct -u COMx option.

Visual Studio 2022

Visual Studio can directly open the provided port/windows-windows-h4-zephyr/CMakeLists.txt and allows to compile and run all examples.

mingw64

It can also be compiles with a regular Unix-style toolchain like mingw-w64. mingw64-w64 is based on MinGW, which '...provides a complete Open Source programming tool set which is suitable for the development of native MS-Windows applications, and which do not depend on any 3rd-party C-Runtime DLLs.'

In the MSYS2 shell, you can install everything with pacman:

$ pacman -S git
$ pacman -S cmake
$ pacman -S make
$ pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain
$ pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-portaudio
$ pacman -S python
$ pacman -S winpty

Compilation with CMake

With mingw64-w64 installed, just go to the port/windows-h4 directory and use CMake as usual

$ cd port/windows-h4
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make

Note: When compiling with msys2-32 bit and/or the 32-bit toolchain, compilation fails as conio.h seems to be mission. Please use msys2-64 bit with the 64-bit toolchain for now.

Console Output

When running the examples in the MSYS2 shell, the console input (via btstack_stdin_support) doesn't work. It works in the older MSYS and also the regular CMD.exe environment. Another option is to install WinPTY and then start the example via WinPTY like this:

$ winpty ./gatt_counter.exe

The packet log will be written to hci_dump.pklg