Windows Cygwin Development Environment (Maintenance Instructions)
WARNING
This development environment is community supported and maintained. It may or may not work with current versions of PX4.
See Toolchain Installation for information about the environments and tools supported by the core development team.
This topic explains how to construct and extend the development environment used for the no-longer-supported Cygwin-based Windows Development Environment.
Additional Information
Features / Issues
The following features are known to work (version 2.0):
- Building and running SITL with jMAVSim with significantly better performance than a VM (it generates a native windows binary px4.exe).
- Building and uploading NuttX builds (e.g.: px4_fmu-v2 and px4_fmu-v4)
- Style check with astyle (supports the command:
make format
) - Command line auto completion
- Non-invasive installer! The installer does NOT affect your system and global path (it only modifies the selected installation directory e.g. **C:\PX4** and uses a temporary local path).
- The installer supports updating to a new version keeping your personal changes inside the toolchain folder
Omissions:
- Simulation: Gazebo and ROS are not supported.
- Only NuttX and JMAVSim/SITL builds are supported.
- Known problems (Also use to report issues).
Shell Script Installation
You can also install the environment using shell scripts in the Github project.
Make sure you have Git for Windows installed.
Clone the repository https://github.com/PX4/windows-toolchain to the location you want to install the toolchain. Default location and naming is achieved by opening the
Git Bash
and executing:shcd /c/ git clone https://github.com/PX4/windows-toolchain PX4
If you want to install all components navigate to the freshly cloned folder and double click on the script
install-all-components.bat
located in the foldertoolchain
. If you only need certain components and want to safe Internet traffic and or disk space you can navigate to the different component folders like e.g.toolchain\cygwin64
and click on the install-XXX.bat scripts to only fetch something specific.Continue with Getting Started.
Manual Installation (for Toolchain Developers)
This section describes how to setup the Cygwin toolchain manually yourself while pointing to the corresponding scripts from the script based installation repo. The result should be the same as using the scripts or MSI installer.
INFO
The toolchain gets maintained and hence these instructions might not cover every detail of all the future changes.
Create the folders: **C:\PX4**, **C:\PX4\toolchain** and **C:\PX4\home**
Download the Cygwin installer file setup-x86_64.exe from the official Cygwin website
Run the downloaded setup file
In the wizard choose to install into the folder: **C:\PX4\toolchain\cygwin64**
Select to install the default Cygwin base and the newest available version of the following additional packages:
- Category:Packagename
- Devel:cmake (3.3.2 gives no deprecated warnings, 3.6.2 works but has the warnings)
- Devel:gcc-g++
- Devel:gdb
- Devel:git
- Devel:make
- Devel:ninja
- Devel:patch
- Editors:xxd
- Editors:nano (unless you're the vim pro)
- Python:python2
- Python:python2-pip
- Python:python2-numpy
- Python:python2-jinja2
- Python:python2-pyyaml
- Python:python2-cerberus
- Archive:unzip
- Utils:astyle
- Shells:bash-completion
- Web:wget
INFO
Do not select as many packages as possible which are not on this list, there are some which conflict and break the builds.
INFO
That's what cygwin64/install-cygwin-px4.bat does.
Write up or copy the batch scripts
run-console.bat
andsetup-environment.bat
.The reason to start all the development tools through the prepared batch script is they preconfigure the starting program to use the local, portable Cygwin environment inside the toolchain's folder. This is done by always first calling the script setup-environment.bat and the desired application like the console after that.
The script setup-environment.bat locally sets environmental variables for the workspace root directory
PX4_DIR
, all binary locationsPATH
, and the home directory of the unix environmentHOME
.Add necessary python packages to your setup by opening the Cygwin toolchain console (double clicking run-console.bat) and executing
shpip2 install toml pip2 install pyserial pip2 install pyulog
INFO
That's what cygwin64/install-cygwin-python-packages.bat does.
Download the ARM GCC compiler as zip archive of the binaries for Windows and unpack the content to the folder
C:\PX4\toolchain\gcc-arm
.INFO
This is what the toolchain does in: gcc-arm/install-gcc-arm.bat.
Install the JDK:
- Download Java 14 from Oracle or AdoptOpenJDK.
- Because sadly there is no portable archive containing the binaries directly you have to install it.
- Find the binaries and move/copy them to C:\PX4\toolchain\jdk.
- You can uninstall the Kit from your Windows system again, we only needed the binaries for the toolchain.
INFO
This is what the toolchain does in: jdk/install-jdk.bat.
Download Apache Ant as zip archive of the binaries for Windows and unpack the content to the folder
C:\PX4\toolchain\apache-ant
.TIP
Make sure you don't have an additional folder layer from the folder which is inside the downloaded archive.
INFO
This is what the toolchain does in: apache-ant/install-apache-ant.bat.
Download, build and add genromfs to the path:
Clone the source code to the folder C:\PX4\toolchain\genromfs\genromfs-src with
shcd /c/toolchain/genromfs git clone https://github.com/chexum/genromfs.git genromfs-src
Compile it with:
shcd genromfs-src make all
Copy the resulting binary genromfs.exe one folder level out to: C:\PX4\toolchain\genromfs
Make sure all the binary folders of all the installed components are correctly listed in the
PATH
variable configured by setup-environment.bat.