Add the ability to flash nightly build firmware from the CI/CD artifacts

[DusKing1]

That will somehow ease the testing workflow. Authors only need to tell testers which build number to flash, no need for loading local hex files.

I can see there is now only AM32 has a CI/CD system, but I think in the future bluejay will also have one.

I can change the AM32 CI/CD to make the URLs for artifacts can be easily grabbed by configurator, just tell me the format/style you prefer.

[stylesuxx]

Nightlies should definitely have a separate place, maybe their own dropdown activated by a checkbox or similar.

How is the current structure of the artifacts? Is it enough to only offer the latest build? If so then I would suggest the following structure:

/releases/download/nightly/{0}_latest.hex

[DusKing1]

Currently, nightly structure only exists in action's artifacts. It's a separate zip file but one only have bin for config tool and another only have hex for configurator. I can push it to another separate repo's release if you want.

[stylesuxx]

In order to properly integrate this, I would need to have access to the hex files seperately - so one zip is not enough. If you create new releases each day in a repo, we still have the problem that we can not access the latest just by "latest" tag, so more logic is required to fetch the hex files.

I think, having the assets available as separate files (in a seperate repo) is a good idea, I am just not sure if it is worth the hassle to integrate it into the configurator.

[DusKing1]

Putting them directly in repo instead of repo's releases might be difficult, I haven't seen any real example that push the artifacts into the repo or any action can do this. But the release tag can be modified automatically.

A real example that implement nightly build in configurator is the betaflight-configurator, but I haven't look into its mechanism about accessing/fetching those nightly's tags.

Well I'm also not sure whether it worth the effort, but TBH I really like the betaflight configurator can allow users just flash nightly builds instead of load them manually. Sometimes we can really found a bug in it.

[stylesuxx]

Sorry, maybe that was confusing - I meant the repo's releases - anything else would not make sense. And yeah, if the tag could always be updated to latest, that would be OK.

[DusKing1]

Do you have any idea how betaflight configurator fetching nightly builds? @asizon

[stylesuxx]

The point is, that we can't really compare it to BF, since we also need up to date EEPROM Layouts - otherwise we can flash a dev version, but have no way of actually adjusting the settings.

So the whole thing is a bit tricky. Just flashing is no big deal, as long as I can access the files separately in some way. I can also just grab the latest 10 releases from a repo and render them as "development" versions. The tags could then simply be the date when the firmware was built.

So my suggestion would be to set up a repo that only holds the releases and the matching assets. The structure of the assets should be exactly the same as in the regular repo. For AM32 that would be:

https://github.com/AlkaMotors/AM32-MultiRotor-ESC-firmware/releases/download/v1.65/{0}_1.65.hex

The URL for the nightlies would then be:

https://github.com/$USER/$REPO/releases/download/{TAG}/{0}.hex

Then I could easily fetch a list of latest versions via GH API and build the URL for the matching FW. As you see it is important not to have a version in the pattern, so I can reliably re-use the same URL.

[DusKing1]

oh, no version huh? It won't be that tough

[stylesuxx]

Cool. Yes - because if it had a version I would need to each time add a new URL. Without version I set it up one time and it will work for ever ;-)