Adding and Revising Configurations and Settings

This page explains how to add a new CONFIG to the g2core project. Please read Adding and Revising Boards first if you haven't already:

1. Adding and Revising Boards (please read this first)
2. Adding and Revising Configurations and Settings (this page)
3. Adding and Revising Motate Pinouts
4. Adding Configurations to an IDE

Settings Files

The default settings file settings_default.h is the "base" settings that will always get applied. The default settings sets rational values for most configurations, and disables the motors axes, extruders, and other devices. Machine-specific settings files, like settings_Printrbot_Simple1608.h override these settings on an item-by-item basis. Any settings that are not #defined in the machine settings file will use the value in the default file. (Note that this changed in build 098.04. Prior to that each settings file had to provide every possible setting.)

In order to make a new settings file, you can copy one that's close to the configuration you want, or you can copy just the keys from the settings_default.h file that you wish to override.

Adding a New Configuration

Configurations live in boards.mk, and are simply assigning a BOARD and SETTINGS_FILE based on the value of CONFIG. Here is the complete definition for CONFIG=PrintrbotSimple1608 as an example:

ifeq ("$(CONFIG)","PrintrbotSimple1608")
    ifeq ("$(BOARD)","NONE")
        BOARD=printrboardG2v3
    endif
    SETTINGS_FILE="settings_printrbot_simple_1608.h"
endif

A few notes from that example:

1. It checks for the exact value of CONFIG to match.
2. It then only sets BOARD if it hasn't been set. (Before boards.mk is included, BOARD is defaulted to "NONE".)
3. Then SETTINGS_FILE is set explicitly. We could also check to see if it has been set, but generally you use a CONFIG to set the SETTINGS_FILE, and wouldn't wish to override it.

One additional note: The name of the CONFIG is used in the output path, and should be something that can be a directory name without issues. Specifically, you shouldn't use spaces, slashes, etc. that could cause trouble with shell scripts, Makefiles, or C++ code. Numbers, upper and lowercase letters, dashes (-), dots (.), and underscores (_) are safe. Everything else should be avoided.