OpenTX 2.2 OSX Build Instructions

The following instructions describe how to set up the build environment, retrieve the source code and lastly build OpenTX on a Apple OSX machine.

Install packages

You need to install Xcode from the Store. It's free, you have time to take a big cup of coffee.

Then a number of tools and libraries have to be installed.

CrossPack AVR for OSX

Download it from there: http://www.obdev.at/products/crosspack/index.html

Get & install Homebrew (http://brew.sh)

(this is to install qmake, the arm compiler, and pyqt)

Install homebrew by pasting this line in terminal (not as root) :

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Answer 'yes' to Xcode command line tools installation

GCC-ARM tools and essential build tools

In a terminal window

brew tap PX4/homebrew-px4
brew update
brew cask install xquartz
brew install gcc-arm-none-eabi cmake homebrew/x11/fox dfu-util avrdude

If you get assertion errors in gcc during compilation try a different gcc version (e.g. brew remove gcc-arm-none-eabi and brew install gcc-arm-none-eabi-49)

(Instructions based on ArduPilot)

If you want to build Companion or the simulator also install Qt and SDL

brew install sdl qt5

Installing Python and PyQt5 on OSX (up to, but not including OpenTX 2.2.2)

In a terminal window

brew install python
brew install pyqt5 --with-python

This will install python, pyqt5 and sip, which pyqt depends on.

Installing Python and Pillow on OSX (from OpenTX 2.2.2 on)

In a terminal window

brew install python
pip3 install pillow

This will install python (3.x) and Pillow, a fork of python PIL. Depending on your installation, you might have to use -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE=/usr/local/opt/python/libexec/bin/python when invoking cmake to make use of the python version installed by brew instead of the system one.

This is what you need to install to build binaries

Prepare the source code

Navigate to wherever you want to store the source code. Issue the following command (it will take quite a while to complete):

git clone --recursive -b next https://github.com/opentx/opentx

Git has now built a cloned OpenTX repository for you and switch directly to the next branch.

Build OpenTX 2.2 Firmware and companion

Create a directory for the build, for example directly in the opentx folder

cd opentx
mkdir build
cd build

Run cmake with the configuration options pointing to OpenTX's source directory. You might adjust the path /usr/local/Cellar/qt5/5.6.0 to match your local installation.

cmake -DPCB=X9D+ -DHELI=YES -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/usr/local/opt/qt5 ..

You can find the path with:

brew info qt5

Build the firmware:

make -j4 firmware

If you want to build everything including the companion use

make

If you want to build a disk image (dmg)

make package

Building a release

Warning the steps are quite tidious and only required if you want to build Companion/Disk Image that runs on older version of Mac OS X than your own development machine Mac OS X. For development and personal use it is fine to just use packages from homebrew. Also using MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET can somtetimes lead to strange errors.

• Install Xcode and Xcode command line tools

• Get QT and install it. Should create a dir like Qt/5.7/clang_64 that has the QT libraries.

• Install build time only dependencies via homebrew (http://brew.sh):

      /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
      brew install cmake pyqt pkg-config
  

• Build the dependencies that will later be included with Companion: libusb, libsdl and dfu-util. You need to build these by hand since Homebrew does not allow setting MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET

  • libusb

      wget https://github.com/libusb/libusb/releases/download/v1.0.20/libusb-1.0.20.tar.bz2
      export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.9
      tar xfv libusb-1.0.20.tar.bz2
      cd libusb-1.0.20
      ./configure
      make
      sudo make install
      cd ..
    

  • dfu-util

      wget https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/dfu-util/dfu-util-0.9.tar.gz
      export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.9
      tar xfv dfu-util-0.9.tar.gz
      cd dfu-util-0.9
      ./configure
      make 
      sudo make install
    

  • avrdude

      wget http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/avrdude/avrdude-6.3.tar.gz
      export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.9
      tar xfv avrdude-6.3.tar.gz
      cd avrdude-6.3
      ./configure
      make 
      sudo make install
    

  • libSDL

      wget https://www.libsdl.org/release/SDL-1.2.15.tar.gz
      tar xfv SDL-1.2.15.tar.gz
      export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.9
      cd SDL-1.2.15
      wget 'https://bugzilla-attachments.libsdl.org/attachment.cgi?id=1320' -O patch1
      wget 'https://bugzilla-attachments.libsdl.org/attachment.cgi?id=1324' -O patch2
      wget 'https://hg.libsdl.org/SDL/raw-rev/91ad7b43317a' -O patch3
      patch -p1 < patch1
      patch -p1 < patch2
      patch -p1 < patch3
      ./configure --without-x 
      make
      sudo make install
    

• (Optional) Check libraries/binaries for the minimal OS X version

      otool -l /usr/local/lib/libusb-1.0.0.dylib |grep -A 3 MIN_MACOS
            cmd LC_VERSION_MIN_MACOSX
        cmdsize 16
        version 10.9
            sdk 10.11
  

• Clone OpenTX

      git clone -b next https://github.com/opentx/opentx ~/opentx
  

• Build release

      mkdir -p ~/out/
       ~/opentx/tools/build-companion.sh ~/opentx ~/out/ test
  

• in ~/out/ a complete dmg should be present (opentx-companion-2.2.0test.dmg)