BareMetal-C

VS Code & Build Environment Setup Guide

This guide will help you set up Visual Studio Code (VS Code) and configure it to work with your Docker-based build environment.

0. Prerequisites: Tools and SimulIDE installation

Before setting up VS Code, ensure the tools (which includes GitHub Desktop and Docker Desktop) and SimulIDE are installed and running, as VS Code depends on it.

  1. Follow instructions to setup tools.
  2. Follow instructions to setup SimulIDE.

1. Install Visual Studio Code

For Windows

  1. Download the Windows installer from the official website: code.visualstudio.com.
  2. Run the installer (VSCodeUserSetup-{version}.exe).

  3. Follow the prompts. Important: On the “Select Additional Tasks” screen, check all 4 boxes. The last box says: “Add to PATH (requires shell restart)”.

    VS Code Setup Additional Tasks

  4. Click Install.

For macOS

  1. Download the macOS Universal build from the official website: code.visualstudio.com.
  2. Open the downloaded zip file.
  3. Drag the Visual Studio Code.app into your Applications folder.
  4. Launch VS Code.
  5. (Optional but Recommended) Open the Command Palette (Cmd+Shift+P), type Shell Command: Install 'code' command in PATH, and press Enter.

2. Set the profile and open the Workspace

  1. Quit VS Code if it is open.

  2. Click this link to open -> BareMetal-C Student Profile

    Your web browser will open a new page that looks like this:

    web profile

    Click on Create in Visual Studio Code and give permission to your web browser to open Visual Studio Code.

    allow vscode

  3. VS Code will open a page like below:

    create profile

    Click Create.

    And the next window will pop up. Click Trust Publisher and Install.

    trust publisher

    This will take a while, and finally, VS Code window will show up.

  4. Click the settings icon (1). Choose Profile (2) and select BareMetal-C Student (3).

    choose profile

  5. Check the gear ⚙ on the bottom left, it will have some characters on it like BA or something else (1). Click File and Open Workspace from File...

    open workspace

    and choose this file:

    Windows: C:\Users\NAME\Documents\BareMetal-C\student.code-workspace

    macOS: ~/Documents/BareMetal-C/student.code-workspace

  6. When asked Do you trust the authors of the files in this workspace?. Click Yes, I trust the authors.

    trust workspace

  7. If things work correctly, you will see:

    check

    If it doesn’t look like the screenshot above, click Explorer Icon (1).

    Then, check the name at (2). You must see the checkmark (✅) and the robot (🤖). The full thing in (2) must be:

    ✅ BareMetal-C 🤖

    If it does not look like the above, close VS Code and re-open it and see the steps that you may be missing.

  8. Check extension:

    Clieck Extensions button (1), and you should see the extension installed. (2)

    check extension

Double clicking student.code-workspace is the way we start VS Code for this class.

4. Running the Build Environment

  1. Click Explorer icon to go back to folder explorer. Then right click on code folder:

    right click code

  2. A context menu opens up, choose BareMetal-C and Build BareMetal-C Projects (All)

    build all

    A lot of text will be printed in the terminal, but eventually, you should have all projects built. Look for (TIME) ------ built PROJECT_NAME.bin ------- like this:

    built all

    If you got this far, your installation is successful.

  3. Let’s try clean up. Right click on folder code again, but this time, choose BareMetal-C and Clean BareMetal-C Projects (All) and you should see terminal with the text (TIME) -------- clean successful --------

    cleaned

We will use the right click on a folder to build and clean our programming projects. More instructions later!

5. Next step:

Go to test the environment.

Go back to home page

This site is open source. Improve this page.