This tutorial will demonstrate how to set up a windows machine to develop, build, and deploy binaries for the crazyflie natively, without use of a VM. Some notes on the setup environment used to write this guide:

• Using windows 10 – no technical reason why this wouldn't work on Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 though.
• Whenever presented with a choice, x86 versions of the tools were chosen. It's important to keep this consistent since and x86 emulator wont' be able to call amd64 binaries, etc. Using all AMD64 should technically work, though.
• Cygwin was chosen for a unix environment since it's probably the most common option out there. As stated below, MinGW is probably the best option because it's extremely lightweight and really all you need are a small handful of unix tools.

A set of common utilities are required for developing, including (but not necessarily limited to):

• Make
• Git
• Tar (used in the crazyflie2-nrf-firmware project to unzip the nordic SDK)
• Unzip (used in the crazyflie2-nrf-firmware project to unzip the nordic SDK)
• Wget (used in the crazyflie2-nrf-firmware project to download the nordic SDK)

For these basic tools, it's recommended to get a linux shell environment running on windows. There are a variety of options:

Cygwin aspires to be a full POSIX environment for windows and is the most fully featured option, but also the most heavyweight. See installation details at http://cygwin.com. Be sure to select at least all of the packages listed above, as well as whatever else you use to develop (vim, etc).

MinGW is a much more minimalist toolchain instead of a full POSIX environment. It's essentially a set of common unix tools built as standalone win32 exes invoked from a cmd prompt. This is probably the recommended option if you don't already have Cygwin installed for other reasons, since it's much more lightweight. Details here: http://www.mingw.org/

Note: GIT isn't included in the MinGW packages. GIT for windows can be found at https://git-for-windows.github.io/

Windows 10 supports (in beta) the ability to run an Ubuntu based bash shell natively, including apt-get and things you'd expect on normal Ubuntu. This is only a half-option for now: The main drawback is that hardware support (the crazyradio, for example) is not plumbed through to this shell, so you won't be able to flash, connect, or run the python tools which talk to hardware. Details here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/about