This is an important update about the yotta registry, which is used to build the microbit-dal and related projects for the BBC micro:bit V1.

What is changing?

Arm is in the process of deprecating the yotta registry. Official support ended in October 2020 and it will be switched off by April 2022.

The Micro:bit Educational Foundation were only using the registry for finding the micro:bit targets, not the rest of the micro:bit dependencies, which are fetched from GitHub.

To solve this issue, it is now required to also fetch the targets from GitHub in the same way we do the dependencies.

This means that projects that were building using yotta will need to update their build systems to avoid using the registry.

This is well supported in yotta and we have split out the two popular targets from the old microbit-targets repository into their own repositories so they can be easily accessed directly.

New target locations

bbc-microbit-classic-gcc can be found at https://github.com/lancaster-university/yotta-target-bbc-microbit-classic-gcc
bbc-microbit-classic-gcc-nosd can be found at https://github.com/lancaster-university/yotta-target-bbc-microbit-classic-gcc-nosd

What you need to change in your build process

In most cases, the changes you need to make to your build process are simply to specify the full URL of the target when calling yotta target

For example

Old

yt target bbc-microbit-classic-gcc-nosd

New

yt target bbc-microbit-classic-gcc-nosd@https://github.com/lancaster-university/yotta-target-bbc-microbit-classic-gcc-nosd

It's a bit more to type, but apart from that the build should proceed as it did before.

Using other targets

If you're using any of the other targets from microbit-targets or have your own custom target you can either push the target up to GitHub in a similar way (note you will need to update the mbed dependency as in this commit