Github runner action for firmware

[brentfpage]

action for building the firmware.

@brentfpage creating this missing workflow, would that be a challenge you'd like to own?

Originally posted by @mi-hol in #381 (comment)

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Did so in this fork/branch. The workflow file is here and uses GH AVR make action.

Running the workflow produced a variant 02 .hex firmware file that I flashed to the board and that performed well.

There are some drawbacks of GH AVR make action:

• it requires that the makefile be in the project home directory. It would be preferable for the makefile to remain somewhere in the AVR_Code directory
• it only builds the first target in the makefile. As a result, building both the 02 and 01 variants with a single workflow run is probably difficult or not possible.

Also, I had to make the edits to the firmware src files described here for the build to be successful. I was surprised by this because the workflow runs on ubuntu-latest. @mmehari From the discussion in #369, I gathered that the described src edits were not required when you ran the makefile on a Linux/ubuntu platform – is that right?

[mi-hol]

There are some drawbacks of GH AVR make action:

@brentfpage Would creating an issue in https://github.com/bazhenov/action-avr-make maybe help to resolve these topics?

[brentfpage]

From action.yml in that repo, it looks like the runner action is essentially a wrapper of this docker container. Maybe there is a simple way to revise action.yml to add a directory argument in which to run make. I plan to look into it and add a PR to action-avr-make if there's a good solution.

[brentfpage]

Forked that repo and added arguments 'dir' and 'target' to the action that specify the directory of the makefile and which target to run. Opened a PR on that repo in case the original author wants to incorporate the new functionality.

Until that happens, it's necessary to invoke my fork/branch's version of the action. I'm doing so in the workflow_for_avr_build branch of my Labrador fork and successfully building both variants.

[mi-hol]

Also, I had to make the edits to the firmware src files described here for the build to be successful. I was surprised by this because the workflow runs on ubuntu-latest

Could this be casued by the version of gcc used by avr-toolchain?
Unfortuntely version info is not displayed by this rather old action.

[brentfpage]

I don't think so, because I have downloaded a recent version of the gnu avr toolchain on my mac and it also requires that the mentioned src edits be made.

[mi-hol]

Maybe trying with https://github.com/modern-avr/toolchain would be beneficial

[brentfpage]

I think this is instead intended for downloading the avr toolchain on users' local machines, but I could be wrong.