Month: May 2019

Analog Devices CrossCore Embedded Studio on macOS using Lubuntu

Continuing from my previous how-to post, today I’d like to show you how to develop on Analog Devices hardware using CrossCore Embeded Studio on macOS. As it is with most of these types of sofware – they run on Windows and sometimes (if you’re lucky) they’ll have a Linux version. In my case I wasn’t 100% lucky, as the Linux version does not run quite perfectly on virtual machine.

Prerequisites

  1. VirtualBox
  2. Lubuntu LiveCD
  3. Analog Devices CrossCore Embedded Studio (this one you can download inside the virtual machine)
  4. Windows virtual machine (I used one downloaded from modern.ie)

Prepare virtual machine

After installing the VirtualBox and downloading Lubuntu LiveCD, go and create a new virtual machine with at least 40GB of disk space (you’ll actually need less than that, but it’s always safe to have some legroom).

Mount the LiveCD and install the bare minimum Lubuntu with GUI. After installing the Lubuntu, open the web browser inside it and download CrossCore Embedded Studio.

Installing CCES

Installing CCES is pretty straight forward, just install the deb package using:

wget http://download.analog.com/tools/CrossCoreEmbeddedStudio/Releases/Release_2.8.3/adi-CrossCoreEmbeddedStudio-linux-x86-2.8.3.deb
cd ~/Downloads/
sudo dpkg -i adi-CrossCoreEmbeddedStudio-linux-x86-2.8.3.deb

It will be installed under /opt/analog/cces/2.8.3/.

Unfortunatelly CCES is based on Eclipse (requires Java) and is 32-bit only, so you’ll have to install a few more dependencies by hand to make it work:

sudo apt install lib32z1 lib32stdc++6 lib32ncurses5 openjdk-8-jre:i386 libswt-gtk-3-java:i386

Now you can run the CCES by running:

/opt/analog/cces/2.8.3/Eclipse/cces

Installing license

This is the tricky part – unfortunatelly CCES can’t install license on Lubuntu – it fails with error “validation code has expired” even after entering a valid serial and all the registration data. It also can’t do the e-mail validation and effectivelly won’t add your serial number to license manager. Don’t worry – I found a workaround – use Windows. Bare with me…

You’ll need to do following:

  1. Download Windows on a VirtualBox disk image (I used modern.ie for that purpose with Windows 10 disk image)
  2. Before launching the image change it’s network adapter’s MAC address to match the one used in Lubuntu (Go to Settings -> Network -> Advanced) as CCES uses MAC address to tie the activation to your computer.
  3. Launch Windows, install CCES, activate CCES using your serial number.
  4. Now you’ll have to copy the license.dat file from C:\ProgramData\Analog Devices\CrossCore Embedded Studio\license.dat to your Lubuntu ~/.analog/cces/license.dat – easiest way is to copy it through shared clip-board, because license.dat is just a text file. Just mind that on Windows it has CRLF line endings whereas on Linux it’s LF only.
  5. Get rid of Windows.

Use CrossCore Embedded Studio

When all that is done, you’re ready to write your DSP stuff on a macOS in a virtual Linux, just pass throuh [the device] to the guest machine (Go to Devices -> USB -> [device]) and you’re good to go.