Development Environment on Mac

MacOS is a supported development platform for PX4. The following instructions set up an environment for building:

• NuttX-based hardware (Pixhawk, etc.)
• jMAVSim Smulation
• Gazebo 8 Simulation

To build other targets see: Toolchain Installation > Supported Targets.

Homebrew Installation

The installation of Homebrew is quick and easy: installation instructions.

Common Tools

After installing Homebrew, run these commands in your shell to install the common tools:

brew tap PX4/px4
brew install px4-dev
# Optional, but recommended additional simulation tools:
brew install px4-sim

If the installation outputs an error message about missing requirements follow the instructions. Your system will be missing Java and Quartz:

brew cask install xquartz java

Install pip if you don't already have it and use it to install the required packages:

sudo easy_install pip
sudo -H pip install pyserial empy toml numpy pandas jinja2

Ground Control Software

Download and install the QGroundControl Daily Build.

Editor / IDE

The development team often use:

• Visual Studio Code: quite new, popular open source IDE
• Eclipse for C/C++: very feature rich Java based IDE
• Sublime Text: a fast and lean text editor.
• Qt Creator: A popular open-source IDE.

On linux the installation scripts automatically install Qt Creator as part of the common dependencies. You can launch it by entering qtcreator in a bash terminal.

Next Steps

Once you have finished setting up the environment, continue to the build instructions.