This collection of files is part of the sdunio environment on Windows systems. It contains the bare minimum of command line tools needed to run the build process either from the IDE or using a Makefile.

I didn't write any of the tools contained in this repository. The only purpose of this compilation is to save you some work downloading them separately.

This repository is not supposed to be used separately. It is only used to build the Windows version of the sduino-tools archive which is downloaded automatically by the Arduino Board Manager. See the sduino repository for details.

In case you still prefer a full manual install, download the repository and copy the content of the tools directory tree into your sduino/hardware/sduino/tools directory.

For GUI based builds that is already enough. For use of the Makefile-based build system add the sduino/tools/win directory to your path or move the files in there to a directory that is already in your path.

All the tools in the convinience package are 32 bit. If you need the 64 bit versions you might have to collect them yourself.

You need make with some basic tools and stm8flash. make is a standard tool included in either MinGW/Msys or cygwin. Both are fine, MinGW/Msys is smaller. stm8flash is easily compiled from the stm8flash repository.

MinGW/MSys and cygwin are both fine. cygwin aims to be an almost complete POSIX environment (which is nice, but we don't need it here). MinGW wants to be more compact and works with the native Windows API. That is good enough for this purpose.

1. Check the MinGW Installation Notes
2. Download mingw-get-setup.exe from https://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/Installer/
3. Start it. You can safely deactivate the graphical option.
4. Add this at the end to your path: ;c:\mingw\bin;c:\mingw\msys\1.0\bin (follow the instructions in "Environment Setting" on the Installation Notes page)
5. Open a command line and install the package msys-base by issuing this command: mingw-get install msys-base
6. Now ls or make should work.

For efficiency, the Makefile is configured to use dash instead of bash as a shell. egrep is replaced by grep -E. The bare minimum of tools you will need to run the Arduino.mk makefile:

dash make
awk cat cut expr grep head ls mkdir sed tr uname which

There isn't a current precompiled windows binary for stm8flash, but it easily compiles from the stm8flash repository using either MinGW or cygwin. You will need the libusb windows binary: http://libusb.info/ (I used the MinGW32 dll)

It works, but using the Arduino.mk makefile with Windows is slow. Very slow. Painfully slow. Compiling-the-Blink-example-takes-about-40-seconds kind of slow. Yes, seriously. No kidding. 40 seconds. Measured on a 3GHz machine with 4GB RAM.

There is no easy fix, the underlying problem is a fundamental one. It is not about the compilation itself, it is the way Makefiles are written and executed. The whole concept relies on forking subprocesses for all the shell calls. Unfortunately, there is nothing like a fork in Windows and to work around that is painfully slow.

It might help to replace the painfully slow parameter checking part of the makefile (that causes the majority of forking) by a single shell script that gets called by the makefile and delivers the results in no time. Or use cmake. Or to integrate it somehow into the STVD IDE. Or whatever.

Until than the least annoying way out might be using a virtual machine running a simple Linux system. Ubuntu Mate or a basic Debian install for example. Virtual Box is great for this purpose and freely available. Or try using the new Linux-Subsystem of Windows 10.