As you've probably seen in the "Creating You First Program" page, creating a program with Arduino-CMake usually means creating a firmware image from that program.

Arduino is a microcontroller, meaning it has no OS whatsoever, thus is can't run "standard" executables as would Linux, Windows, etc. Instead, Arduino requires a whole firmware image to be burned to it every time it should run a new program. This makes the process of creating and burning a firmware image the most valuable to Arduino's build chain, and Arduino-CMake respects that well, very well.

Note: Burning is equivalent to uploading in this context

Creating a firmware image for the program at hand is done by calling the generate_arduino_firmware function. This function accepts the following parameters:

Let's look at an example which creates a program consisting of 3 source files, a header and also includes the SoftwareSerial library:

generate_arudino_firmware(${CMAKE_PROJECT_NAME}
		SRCS main.cpp buffer.cpp buffer_interuptter.cpp
		HDRS buffer.hpp
		ARDLIBS SoftwareSerial)