CMake can be described as a marmite application: you either love it or hate it. Here at Feabhas, we find ourselves falling in the latter category, despite the fact the CMake is widely used within the embedded and deeply embedded development community. But we also know that many of the C/C++ static analysis and code quality tools integrate well with the CMake build system. For this reason, we’ve put aside our prejudices and reconsidered the way we build our example projects used during training by replacing scons with CMake. This blog post is a mix of musings and advice when using CMake for cross-compiling to the STM STM32F407 Discovery board that we use for our embedded C and C++ training. It is the first of a small series of posts looking at how we build our training projects comprising application code, supporting library code, real-time operating system and bare metal driver code.