Getting started developing for the Westlicht Performer

Here are my annotated notes on setting up OSX to contribute to the Westlicht performer sequencer.

1st step is cloning the github repository:

mkdir performer-sequencer
cd performer-sequencer
git clone --recursive https://github.com/westlicht/performer.git

I don’t recall if git is pre-installed on modern macs. If not you’ll need to install git as well. One item which is not installed is is cmake. Realizing I needed cmake and possibly other items is what prompted me to create this post.

I already had homebrew installed, so tried :

brew upgrade cmake
brew install sdl2
brew install libusb # perhaps not needed
brew install libusb-compat

which, after updating brew, worked (we’ll need sdl2 and libusb later on)

A first attempt at compiling is done with:

cd performer
make tools_install

Note that this step appears to install the arm compiler tools. I wish I would have skipped this and saw if things worked without them. Eventually I’ll need them but in case I do not move forward on this I’d prefer to not have the tools installed on my computer – especially as they are not under package management.

My install failed anyway with:

configure: error: libusb-1.x is required for the MPSSE mode of FTDI based devices
make[1]: *** No targets specified and no makefile found.  Stop.
make[1]: Nothing to be done for `install'.

so moving on…

make setup_stm32

sets up the build dirs according to the developers readme. Ran without fail.

Next up is:

make setup_sim

My first results i below. However as a note I performed a parallel install and had a different error:

libopencm3 submodule not found!

which was fixed with :

git submodule update --init --recursive

The first time I tried, it exited with:

-- Building for platform sim ...
CMake Error at /usr/local/Cellar/cmake/3.15.4/share/cmake/Modules/FindPackageHandleStandardArgs.cmake:137 (message):
  Could NOT find SDL2 (missing: SDL2_LIBRARY SDL2_INCLUDE_DIR)
Call Stack (most recent call first):
  /usr/local/Cellar/cmake/3.15.4/share/cmake/Modules/FindPackageHandleStandardArgs.cmake:378 (_FPHSA_FAILURE_MESSAGE)
  cmake/FindSDL2.cmake:173 (FIND_PACKAGE_HANDLE_STANDARD_ARGS)
  src/platform/sim/CMakeLists.txt:8 (find_package)


-- Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!
See also "/Users/jack/performer-sequencer/performer/build/sim/debug/CMakeFiles/CMakeOutput.log".
make: *** [setup_sim] Error 1

I need to fix this but first I may as well try compiling the sequencer itself:

cd build/stm32/release
make -j

which, surprisingly worked :

[100%] Built target sequencer

To build for the simulator:

make setup_sim
cd build/sim/debug
make -j

To run the simulator

./src/apps/sequencer/sequencer