nRF Connect SDK example application

This repository contains an nRF Connect SDK example application. The main purpose of this repository is to serve as a reference on how to structure nRF Connect SDK based applications. Some of the features demonstrated in this example are:

• Basic Zephyr application skeleton
• Zephyr workspace applications
• Zephyr modules
• West T2 topology
• Custom boards
• Custom devicetree bindings
• Out-of-tree drivers
• Out-of-tree libraries
• Example CI configuration (using Github Actions)
• Custom west extension
• Doxygen and Sphinx documentation boilerplate

This repository is versioned together with the nRF Connect SDK main tree. This means that every time that nRF Connect SDK is tagged, this repository is tagged as well with the same version number, and the manifest entry for zephyr will point to the corresponding nRF Connect SDK tag. For example, the ncs-example-application v2.5.0 will point to nRF Connect SDK v2.5.0. Note that the main branch always points to the development branch of nRF Connect SDK, also main.

Getting started

Before getting started, make sure you have a proper nRF Connect SDK development environment. Follow the official Installation guide.

Initialization

The first step is to initialize the workspace folder (my-workspace) where the example-application and all nRF Connect SDK modules will be cloned. Run the following command:

# initialize my-workspace for the ncs-example-application (main branch)
west init -m https://github.com/nrfconnect/ncs-example-application --mr main my-workspace
# update nRF Connect SDK modules
cd my-workspace
west update

Building and running

To build the application, run the following command:

cd example-application
west build -b $BOARD app

where $BOARD is the target board.

You can use the custom_plank board found in this repository. Note that you can use Zephyr and nRF Connect SDK sample boards if an appropriate overlay is provided (see app/boards).

A sample debug configuration is also provided. To apply it, run the following command:

west build -b $BOARD app -- -DOVERLAY_CONFIG=debug.conf

Once you have built the application, run the following command to flash it:

west flash

Testing

To execute Twister integration tests, run the following command:

west twister -T tests --integration

Documentation

A minimal documentation setup is provided for Doxygen and Sphinx. To build the documentation first change to the doc folder:

cd doc

Before continueing, check if you have Doxygen installed. It is recommended to use the same Doxygen version used in CI. To install Sphinx, make sure you have a Python installation in place and run:

pip install -r requirements.txt

API documentation (Doxygen) can be built using the following command:

doxygen

The output will be stored in the _build_doxygen folder. Similarly, the Sphinx documentation (HTML) can be built using the following command:

make html

The output will be stored in the _build_sphinx folder. You may check for other output formats other than HTML by running make help.