> if I don't have cmake installed, will make work instead? Then $NUPIC and $NTA will get created in a make file?

Actually $NUPIC and $NTA are created from own CMake script. There's a CMake command called "execute_process()" which we can call any shell command without need create a .sh file for this purpose, because this I insist in remove shell scripts as they are not portable.

Note that CMake doesnt build anything, it simply generates rules scripts for the build software that you choose (not matter if Make, Visual Studio, Eclipse, etc). So in the case of Make, the repository wont have any Makefile (for our enjoy!), they will be generated from CMake script ONLY if the user want generate them from command line (Make is the default generator when CMake is called from shell, but one also can choose Ninja as build tool which builds faster).

Thus in case of Travis, the script should call first CMake for generates the Make (or Ninja) files and then build the project from these generated scripts.