Silicon Labs Simplicity Commander

The Simplicity Commander is a utility provided, maintained and supported by Silicon Labs.
As it is a third-party utility, SEGGER does not maintain the utility, nor does it provide support for it.
SEGGER recommends to get in touch with Silicon Labs in case any questions arise regarding Simplicity Commander.

This article goes into detail on how the Simplicity Commander can be used with J-Link.

Setup

Download on silabs.com

The Simplicity Commander can be downloaded from Silicon Labs' web page at https://www.silabs.com/developers/mcu-programming-options . Under the section "In-System Programming", installers for Windows, macOS and Linux can be downloaded.

After downloading, Simplicity Commander does not require further installation.

Path to executable

For Windows, the executable is contained inside nested .zip archives which need to be extracted before the executable can be started. After extracting the .zip archives, the Simplicity Commander can be started by executing commander.exe.

Changing debug mode

Some evaluation boards by Silicon Labs, like the "EFM8 Busy Bee" family of boards, feature a J-Link OB - an on-board debug probe for debugging the EFM8 target device.
Using Simplicity Commander, it is possible to change the debug mode for those boards. The following debug modes are available:

• Debug MCU
  • In this mode, J-Link OB is connected to the EFM8 device on the evaluation board.
• Debug OUT
  • In this mode, J-Link OB can be used to debug an external target device that is NOT the EFM8 device on the evaluation board.
• Debug IN
  • In this mode, J-Link OB is disconnected and an external debug probe (e.g. a J-Link PLUS) can be connected to debug the EFM8 device on the evaluation baord.

The following steps describe how to switch between the debug modes of an evaluation boards:

1. Supply power to the Silicon Labs evaluation board and connect it to a host PC via USB
2. Make sure Simplicity Commander is set up on the host PC as described in Setup

   

3. Click "Select Kit..."
4. Select the desired evaluation board from the list of available kits

   

5. Make sure "Kit" is selected
6. In the "Kit Information" group box, the debug mode can be changed