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BUILD_GUIDE.md

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Build Guide

Build Environment Setup

Windows (Vista and later)

  1. If you have ever installed WinAVR, uninstall it.
  2. Install MHV AVR Tools. Disable smatch, but be sure to leave the option to add the tools to the PATH checked.
  3. Install MinGW. During installation, uncheck the option to install a graphical user interface. DO NOT change the default installation folder. The scripts depend on the default location.
  4. Clone this repository. This link will download it as a zip file, which you'll need to extract. Open the extracted folder in Windows Explorer.
  5. Double-click on the 1-setup-path-win batch script to run it. You'll need to accept a User Account Control prompt. Press the spacebar to dismiss the success message in the command prompt that pops up.
  6. Right-click on the 2-setup-environment-win batch script, select "Run as administrator", and accept the User Account Control prompt. This part may take a couple of minutes, and you'll need to approve a driver installation, but once it finishes, your environment is complete!
  7. Future build commands should be run from the standard Windows command prompt, which you can find by searching for "command prompt" from the start menu or start screen. Ignore the "MHV AVR Shell".

Mac

If you're using homebrew, you can use the following commands:

brew tap osx-cross/avr
brew install avr-libc
brew install dfu-programmer

This is the recommended method. If you don't have homebrew, install it! It's very much worth it for anyone who works in the command line.

You can also try these instructions:

  1. Install Xcode from the App Store.
  2. Install the Command Line Tools from Xcode->Preferences->Downloads.
  3. Install [DFU-Programmer][dfu-prog].

Linux

Install AVR GCC, AVR libc, and dfu-progammer with your favorite package manager.

Debian/Ubuntu example:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gcc-avr avr-libc dfu-programmer

Vagrant

If you have any problems building the firmware, you can try using a tool called Vagrant. It will set up a virtual computer with a known configuration that's ready-to-go for firmware building. OLKB does NOT host the files for this virtual computer. Details on how to set up Vagrant are in the VAGRANT_GUIDE file.

Verify Your Installation

  1. If you haven't already, obtain this repository (https://github.com/jackhumbert/qmk_firmware). You can either download it as a zip file and extract it, or clone it using the command line tool git or the Github Desktop application.
  2. Open up a terminal or command prompt and navigate to the qmk_firmware folder using the cd command. The command prompt will typically open to your home directory. If, for example, you cloned the repository to your Documents folder, then you would type cd Documents/qmk_firmware. If you extracted the file from a zip, then it may be named qmk_firmware-master instead.
  3. To confirm that you're in the correct location, you can display the contents of your current folder using the dir command on Windows, or the ls command on Linux or Mac. You should see several files, including README.md and a quantum folder. From here, you need to navigate to the appropriate folder under keyboard/. For example, if you're building for a Planck, run cd keyboard/planck.
  4. Once you're in the correct keyboard-specific folder, run the make command. This should output a lot of information about the build process.

Customizing, Building, and Deploying Your Firmware

Note: Some keyboard folders have non-standard organizations, and may not even support specifying alternate keymaps. Until these get reorganized, you will need to edit their default keymaps directly.

  1. Running the make command from your keyboard's folder will generate a .hex file based on the default keymap. All keymaps for a particular keyboard live in the keymaps folder in that keyboard's folder. To create your own keymap, duplicate the folder keymaps/default, and rename it with your name, for example jack. Or, if you don't care about the ability to share your keymap with the community via GitHub, you can just modify the default keymap itself. Details on how to program keymap files can be found in other guides.
  2. To build a keymap other than the default, type KEYMAP=<name> after make. So if I've named my keymap jack, the full command would be make KEYMAP=jack.
  3. How you deploy the firmware will depend on whether you are using a PCB or a Teensy. In both cases, you'll need to put the keyboard in bootloader mode, either by pressing a button on the PCB/Teensy or pressing the key with the RESET keycode. Then, if you're using a PCB, just run make KEYMAP=<name> dfu to both build and deploy the firmware. If you're using a Teensy, you'll probably need to take the .hex file that make produces in the keyboard's folder, and deploy it using the Teensy Loader.

Helpful Tips

  1. On Linux or OS X, you can run sleep 5; make KEYMAP=<name> dfu to delay building/deploying the firmware until for 5 seconds, giving you a chance to put the firmware into bootloader mode. You can change the 5 to any number of seconds.

Troubleshooting

  1. Try running make clean if the make command fails.

    WIP