Building the Arduino MMDVM in console

If you have a remote repeater with a headless controller (console only, e.g. RPi without GUI but SSH), you can not use the standard Arduino IDE to compile the Arduino Due MMDVM binary remotely.

Usually you will compile MMDVM locally on a different machine with Arduino IDE installed, upload the binary to the headless controller and use bossac cmd line flash utility to flash the image into the Arduino board.

Another option is to compile MMDVM remotely on the headless controller with a CLI tool: There is a Arduino-CLI compiler available at Github.

Install it according to the instructions from your remote home directory with

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/arduino/arduino-cli/master/install.sh | sh

The arduino-cli will be downloaded and installed to ~/bin which is included in $PATH on most distributions.

To add the SAM Due core files to arduino-cli, do a

arduino-cli core install arduino:sam

This installs all compiler, linker and supplementary stuff to compile sources for the Arduino Due's SAM3X uC. You can check if arduino-cli now knows about Arduino Due when:

arduino-cli core list

shows

arduino:sam 1.6.12 1.6.12 Arduino SAM Boards (32-bits ARM Cortex-M3)

Now clone the MMDVM repository to the headless machine and change into its directory:

git clone https://github.com/g4klx/MMDVM; cd MMDVM

Read the BUILD.txt and add the required lib references to platform.txt with your favorite editor, e.g.

nano ~/.arduino15/packages/arduino/hardware/sam/1.6.12/platform.txt

(Replace version string with your current one)

Check the Config.h as usual for the required settings. Now you are ready to compile the MMDVM on your headless:

arduino-cli compile --fqbn arduino:sam:arduino_due_x_dbg MMDVM

If everything went fine, you will find a new folder build/arduino:sam:arduino_due_x_dbg which holds the finished MMDVM binary.

To flash it to the attached Arduino Due, stop any running MMDVMHost instance and upload the binary with

arduino-cli upload -p /dev/ttyACM0 --fqbn arduino:sam:arduino_due_x_dbg MMDVM

(replace port value to match your scenario)

Finally restart MMDVMHost and check the log output if the correct version and compile date of the Arduino firmware is shown.