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Setting up your development environment

This page will walk you through the steps of setting up your development environment so that you can build and deploy this project onto your flight controller board.

It should be possible to develop on Mac OS, Linux and Windows platforms. This is due to using a variety of open source tools and technologies that are supported on all of these operating systems.

Note: The specific examples provided here will often be written from the perspective of using a Windows development PC. I hope to update this document in the future to provide more specific examples for Mac OS and Linux platforms.

What we'll need

Here are the software tools you'll need:

  • ARM gnu toolchain
    • This is the compiler toolchain we'll use to build the firmware
  • mingw-w64 (if you will be developing under Windows)
    • This is needed solely for the make tool, or more specifically mingw32-make.exe
  • OpenOCD
    • This is only needed if you wish to use an ST-Link adapter to flash your flight controller.
  • STM32CubeProgrammer
    • This is a simple to use flashing tool. It has a GUI interface as well as a command line interface.
  • Visual Studio Code
    • This isn't required but is quite handy to use if you will be editing configuration files or developing code.

Installing the tools

If you don't already have VScode installed on your machine please visit the following website and follow the install directions: https://code.visualstudio.com/

If you'll be developing code I suggest you also install the C/C++ extensions

For the remaining tools I recommend installing them into into a single folder. On my Windows machine I use C:\Tools. You could also choose to use C:\VSARM. Keep it simple and avoid having spaces in the path.

On a Mac or Linux machine you could create a subfolder in your home folder.

mkdir ~/vsarm

Install arm gnu toolchain

Go to: https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-software/open-source-software/developer-tools/gnu-toolchain/gnu-rm/downloads Download the appropriate installer. There are several available.

Windows installation

For my Windows development PC I chose:

gcc-arm-none-eabi-8-2019-q3-update-win32-sha2.exe
Windows 32-bit Installer (Signed for Windows 7 and later)
MD5: d44f44b258b203bdd6808752907754be

Run the installer. When it prompts you to "Choose Install Location" I changed the default shown in "Destination Folder" from:

C:\Program Files (x86)\GNU Tools ARM Embedded\8 2019-q3-update

to 

C:\Tools\armcc

Make sure these gnu tools are in your path. More specifically you will want to add this to your path:

C:\Tools\armcc\bin

Mac OS installation

For my old MacBook I chose to download this version:

Mac OS X 64-bit
File: gcc-arm-none-eabi-8-2019-q3-update-mac.tar.bz2 (105.72 MB)

Using a Finder window I then double-clicked on the downloaded .bz2 file which unpacked the contents into a new folder named:

gcc-arm-none-eabi-8-2019-q3-update

I then renamed that folder to armcc and then moved this armcc folder into my ~/vsarm folder.

Finally I adjusted my path by editing my .zshrc file and added this to the bottom of it:

# vsarm tools
export PATH="$HOME/vsarm/armcc/bin:$PATH"

Note: If you use bash for your shell (which is the default for Mac OS) then add the above to your ~/.bash_profile instead.

Install MinGW-W64 (for Windows machines only)

This step is only needed for Windows development machines.

We need MinGW-W64 for the mingw32-make.exe program. If you have already have a make utility on your machine then you could skip this

Go to: https://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/ Change the install location to:

C:\Tools\mingw

Make sure the MinGW-W64 tools are in your path. More specifically you will want to add this to your path:

C:\Tools\mingw\mingw32\bin

Installing OpenOCD on Windows

Again, this is only necessary if you wish (and are able) to use the ST-Link adapter.

For Windows users I recommend obtaining a version of OpenOCD from here: https://gnutoolchains.com/arm-eabi/openocd/

Download the most recent 7zip file: openocd-20190828.7z Decompress it into C:\Tools folder. Rename the resultant OpenOCD-20190828-0.10.0 folder to just OpenOCD.

Make sure the OpenOCD tools are in your path. More specifically you will want to add this to your path:

C:\Tools\OpenOCD\bin

Note: There are several binary versions of OpenOCD available for installation. The one from SysProgs (gnutoolchains.com) seems to be updated regularly and also provides drivers that may be helpful to you.

Installing OpenOCD on Mac OS

While it may be possible to install a prebuilt version of OpenOCD using Homebrew, I've learned that the OpenOCD project maintainers recommend Mac/Linux users to build it themselves using the latest version of the source code available from the repository.

We'll use Homebrew to build and install OpenOCD using the latest available source code. Using Terminal, enter the following:

brew install open-ocd --HEAD

This took a little while to complete, but once it finished I found it was immmediately available for use at /usr/local/bin/openocd. No adjustments to my path were needed.

Configure VSCode shell

One very important note: The makefile I'm using uses rm -rf as part of building the clean target. This rm command isn't normally available on windows. So I've configured my VSCode environment to use a bash shell whenever it needs to provide a shell for any command.

This bash shell came with my Git for Windows installation. If you have something similar, then you'll want to configure VSCode to use such a shell. Alternatively you can edit the makefile(s) in this project folder.

To configure VSCode to use a particular shell you need to edit your settings.json file. Details are provided here: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/integrated-terminal.

Basically you need to enter a configuration line like one of the following:

// Command Prompt
"terminal.integrated.shell.windows": "C:\\Windows\\System32\\cmd.exe"
// PowerShell
"terminal.integrated.shell.windows": "C:\\Windows\\System32\\WindowsPowerShell\\v1.0\\powershell.exe"
// Git Bash
"terminal.integrated.shell.windows": "C:\\Program Files\\Git\\bin\\bash.exe"
// Bash on Ubuntu (on Windows)
"terminal.integrated.shell.windows": "C:\\Windows\\System32\\bash.exe"

Obviously you should use one of the bash options in the above examples. Personally I prefer the bash from my git install versus the one from my Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) since it loads up much faster.