Welcome to our best attempt to create a guide to use Docker for embedded systems, the guys from web development had been enjoying the benefits of this technology for quiet sometime now as part of the so-called DevOps ( I’m not going to define DevOps ).
Congrats now that you have dockers installed and running on your computer, lets create our first image to show you how docker can help us to develop our programs. I suggest you make a new folder for this purpose an create a dockerfile inside
In the previous article, we demonstrated how to implement a Docker container for a simple program written in C and compiled with GCC, to build and flash our embedded device. However, as embedded engineers, we typically perform cross-compilation for microcontrollers
So far, we’ve been using Arch Linux images as the base to create our development images with the ARM GNU compiler and OpenOCD. The reason for this choice is that it's quite easy to install all the tools we need, thanks to the excellent community behind Arch Linux.
In the last part, we used up to three containers to set up our toolset, and we discovered that it can be a bit tedious and prone to errors. We need to do something about it. Well, Docker Compose is the solution when things get more complex.
So far, we've been working locally, and our images essentially exist only on our own computers for our personal use, mainly to avoid the need to install tools on our host machines. However, the real challenge is sharing this new setup with our coworkers who are also working on the same project.
There is no modern software development without continuous integration, and Docker plays a key role in enhancing this process. I’m not going to explain what a pipeline is or how to set one up in Bitbucket —well, maybe just a little.
By this point, I hope it's clear that a Docker container is essentially like having a virtual machine. You need to understand this concept clearly. Also, keep in mind that VS Code is just a code editor—it allows us to write code, and that's it. There is a plugin called Dev Containers
I will go through some examples using SEGGER GUI tools like Ozone and SystemView, to show you how to put desktop programs in a docker container