Compiling
Now that we’ve installed Apache NuttX prerequisites and downloaded the source code, we are ready to compile the source code into an executable binary file that can be run on the embedded board.
Initialize Configuration
The first step is to initialize NuttX configuration for a given board, based from a pre-existing configuration. To list all supported configurations you can do:
$ cd nuttx $ ./tools/configure.sh -L | less
The output is in the format <board name>:<board configuration>
. You will see that
generally all boards support the nsh
configuration which is a good sarting point
since it enables booting into the interactive command line
NuttShell (NSH).
To choose a configuration you pass the <board name>:<board configuration>
option
to configure.sh
and indicate your host platform, such as:
$ cd nuttx $ ./tools/configure.sh -l stm32f4discovery:nsh
The -l
tells use that we’re on Linux (macOS and Windows builds are
possible). Use the -h
argument to see all available options.
Customize Your Configuration (Optional)
This step is optional. Right now, this is mainly to get familiar with how it works– you don’t need to change any of the options now, but knowing how to do this will come in handy later.
There are a lot of options. We’ll cover a few of them here. Don’t worry about the complexity– you don’t have to use most of the options.
$ cd nuttx/
$ make menuconfig
Todo
Explain some useful options.
Build NuttX
We can now build NuttX. To do so, you can simply run:
$ cd nuttx/ $ make make
The build will complete by generating the binary outputs inside nuttx directory. Typically this includes the nuttx ELF file (suitable for debugging using gdb) and a nuttx.bin file that can be flashed to the board.
To clean the build, you can do:
$ make clean
Warning
At the moment it is recommended that after modifying the configuration you first clean before building again. This is currently worked on.
Next up is Running.