Blinky, your "Hello World!" on a Target Board

The set of Blinky tutorials show you how to create, build, and run a "Hello World" application that blinks a LED on the various target boards that Mynewt supports. The tutorials use the same Blinky application from the Creating Your First Project tutorial.

Objective

Learn how to use packages from a default application repository of Mynewt to build your first Hello World application (Blinky) on a target board. Once built using the newt tool, this application will blink a LED light on the target board.

Available Tutorials

Tutorials are available for the following boards:

We also have a tutorial that shows you how to add Console and Shell to the Blinky Application.

Prerequisites

Ensure that you meet the following prerequisites before continuing with one of the tutorials.

  • Have Internet connectivity to fetch remote Mynewt components.
  • Have a computer to build a Mynewt application and connect to the board over USB.
  • Have a Micro-USB cable to connect the board and the computer.
  • Install the newt tool and toolchains (See Basic Setup).
  • Read the Mynewt OS Concepts section.
  • Create a project space (directory structure) and populate it with the core code repository (apache-mynewt-core) or know how to as explained in Creating Your First Project.

Overview of Steps

These are the general steps to create, load and run the Blinky application on your board:

  • Create a project.
  • Define the bootloader and Blinky application targets for the board.
  • Build the bootloader target.
  • Build the Blinky application target and create an application image.
  • Connect to the board.
  • Load the bootloader onto the board.
  • Load the Blinky application image onto the board.
  • See the LED on your board blink.


After you try the Blinky application on your boards, checkout out other tutorials to enable additional functionality such as remote comms on the current board. If you have BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) chip (e.g. nRF52) on your board, you can try turning it into an iBeacon or Eddystone Beacon!

If you see anything missing or want to send us feedback, please sign up for appropriate mailing lists on our Community Page.