Building in windows

Setup Cygwin

download the Setup*.exe from https://www.cygwin.com/

Cygwin Installation

Execute the download Setup and step through the installation wizard (no need to customize the settings here). Stop at the "Select Packages" Screen and select the following Packages for Installation:

  • Devel/git
  • Devel/git-completion (Optional)
  • Devel/make
  • Devel/binutils
  • Editors/vim
  • Editors/vim-common (Optional)
  • Shells/mintty (should be already selected)

Cygwin Installation

Cygwin Installation

Cygwin Installation

Cygwin Installation

Cygwin Installation

Continue with the Installation and accept all autodetected dependencies.

Cygwin Installation

Setup GNU ARM Toolchain


versions do matter, 4.8-2014-q2 is known to work well. Download this version from https://launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded/+download - preferrebly as a ZIP-File.

Extract the contents of this archive to any folder of your choice, for instance C:\dev\gcc-arm-none-eabi-4_8-2014q2.

GNU ARM Toolchain Setup

add the "bin" subdirectory to the PATH Windows environment variable: %PATH%;C:\dev\gcc-arm-none-eabi-4_8-2014q2\bin

GNU ARM Toolchain Setup

GNU ARM Toolchain Setup

Checkout and compile Cleanflight

Head over to the Cleanflight Github page and grab the URL of the GIT Repository: "https://github.com/cleanflight/cleanflight.git"

Open the Cygwin-Terminal, navigate to your development folder and use the git commandline to checkout the repository:

cd /cygdrive/c/dev
git clone https://github.com/cleanflight/cleanflight.git

GIT Checkout

GIT Checkout

To compile your Cleanflight binaries, enter the cleanflight directory and build the project using the make command. You can append TARGET=[HARDWARE] if you want to build anything other than the default NAZE target:

cd cleanflight
make TARGET=NAZE

GIT Checkout

within few moments you should have your binary ready:

(...)
arm-none-eabi-size ./obj/main/cleanflight_NAZE.elf
   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
  95388     308   10980  106676   1a0b4 ./obj/main/cleanflight_NAZE.elf
arm-none-eabi-objcopy -O ihex --set-start 0x8000000 obj/main/cleanflight_NAZE.elf obj/cleanflight_NAZE.hex

You can use the Cleanflight-Configurator to flash the obj/cleanflight_NAZE.hex file.

Updating and rebuilding

Navigate to the local cleanflight repository and use the following steps to pull the latest changes and rebuild your version of cleanflight:

cd /cygdrive/c/dev/cleanflight
git reset --hard
git pull
make clean TARGET=NAZE
make