Windows-based cross-compiler

Now we have the hardware for our rapid prototyping, we will need to develop software to make use of the capabilities of the hardware. Since compiling on a desktop PC is much faster than compiling on an embedded system, as a common approach in practice, we are editing, compiling, and building code on a Windows host PC to get ARM-compatible programs that will be running on the Linux BeagleBoard. The distinguishing feature of this approach is the cross-platform development: the executable program is built on an x86-Windows platform, but runs on a different ARM-Linux embedded system. In order to do this, you need a cross-platform toolchain with a cross-compiler for your BeagleBoard.

Note

A cross-compiler is able to create an executable program for a platform other than the one on which the compiler is running. In our scenario, the compiler runs on a Windows machine (usually with an x86 processor), but its outputs are executables for an ARM processor. A toolchain is...