To generate a board you need:
- Python (version 2.7, version 3.6 or later);
- Jinja2 template engine for Python (version 2.10 or later);
- ruamel.yaml YAML loader/dumper package for Python;
Both Jinja2 and ruamel.yaml can be easily installed with pip install jinja2 && pip install ruamel.yaml (or
python -m pip install jinja2 followed by python -m pip install ruamel.yaml on Windows), however they may also be
available in the package manager of your system.
Board generator – scripts/generateBoard.py – takes a *.yaml file as an input and produces a folder containing
various board files: source files, headers, CMake files (including CMake toolchain file) and so on. The input
*.yaml file describes the board hardware in a tree-like form. The idea is very close to devicetree and in fact
earlier versions of board generator used devicetree files.
To get an idea about the format of the board YAML files, take a look at some of the existing files, for example
source/board/ST_STM32F4DISCOVERY/ST_STM32F4DISCOVERY.yaml – which describes STM32F4DISCOVERY board from ST – or
source/chip/STM32/STM32F4/chipYaml/ST_STM32F407VG.yaml – which describes STM32F407VG chip used on this board. There
is also some documentation about YAML bindings in documentation/yaml-bindings
Assuming that you already have distortos either as part of your project or as a standalone folder, the basic
invocation of the board generator is just path/to/distortos/scripts/generateBoard.py path/to/board.yaml (or
python path/to/distortos/scripts/generateBoard.py path/to/board.yaml on Windows), for example
./scripts/generateBoard.py source/board/ST_STM32F4DISCOVERY/ST_STM32F4DISCOVERY.yaml. You may also generate so-called
raw-boards, using chip YAML file as the input directly, for example
./scripts/generateBoard.py source/chip/STM32/STM32F4/chipYaml/ST_STM32F407VG.yaml -o output/path/of/raw/board.