Building the firmware

  1. Requirements
  2. Build
  3. Flashing
  4. CI builds

Requirements

  • Debian or Ubuntu-based Linux distribution
  • arm-none-eabi-gcc toolchain (tested with 13.2.1)
  • gcc (host compiler, for the elf2img utility)
  • make

Install the cross-compiler on Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt install gcc-arm-none-eabi

The Cypress FX3 SDK (v1.3.4) is included in the SDK/ directory and is built as part of the firmware build — no separate SDK install is required.

Build 

cd SDDC_FX3
make clean && make all

This produces SDDC_FX3.img, the FX3 firmware image that can be flashed to the device.

Flashing

The image is uploaded to RAM each cold boot via the FX3 BootROM USB protocol. The rx888_tools project ships rx888_stream, which acts as both the firmware uploader (when the device is in the bootloader state, PID 00f3) and the IQ capture tool (once the firmware is running, PID 00f1). See the rx888_tools README for usage.

For details on the BootROM protocol itself, see Cypress AN76405 / EZ-USB FX3 Boot Options — this firmware uses the standard “RAM upload via vendor command” path.

CI builds

The build.yml GitHub Actions workflow builds the firmware on every push and pull-request. Successful builds publish SDDC_FX3.img as a workflow artifact; tagged releases publish it as a release asset via release.yml.

See Releases for the most recent firmware images.

MIT-licensed firmware. The Cypress FX3 SDK is covered by the Cypress Software License Agreement.

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