Using SparkFun Edge Board with Ambiq Apollo3 SDK

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Contributors: Liquid Soulder
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Toolchain Setup

What is a Toolchain? Well according to Wikipedia:

In software, a toolchain is a set of programming tools that is used to perform a complex software development task or to create a software product, which is typically another computer program or a set of related programs.

Definition courtesy of Wikipedia

The complex task we're trying to solve here is to write an application that can make use of the myriad of features found on the Apollo3 from the comfortable convenience of C or C++. The toolchain that we will construct for this purpose is made up of two main parts:

  • Software Development Kit (SDK): a smorgasbord of useful software definitions that are specific to the microcontroller
  • Compiler: turns the SDK code into the specific machine language that the Apollo understands.

Later in this tutorial, we will discuss yet another part of the SDK that helps upload your compiled code to the device.

The SDK is just a big file structure filled with harmless source files - it can't help you much on its own. The compiler is a great tool that you can use but without any source files it won't do much more than get mildly irritated. Our goal in this section is to make sure that the two tools are working together seamlessly.