Cedric,
Thanks for sharing your experiences with ROS on gumstix! There's a lot of valuable information here, and in order for it
to "live on", would you mind setting up a wiki page? I know there's other people out there working on the same thing, so
if we could centralize this information, that would be great! :) Thank you in advance.
Cheers,
Radu.
Cedric Pradalier wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have been spending some effort on making ROS compiling for the gumstix
> and I'd like to share the experience:
>
> First of all, I have tried the approach listed on the wiki, and they are
> not my favourite but they provide a good basis.
>
> The first thing I have done is installing ubuntu on the gumstix (a guide
> for that can be found on
> http://johnwoconnor.blogspot.com/2009/04/installing-ubuntu-on-gumstix-overo.html)
> This simplifies a lot the process of getting all the 3rd party libraries
> compiled (in particular boost, xmlrpc++, log4cxx, apr can then just be
> obtained using an apt-get call).
>
> Once you have installed ubuntu on the gumstix, you could in theory
> install all the -dev packages and gcc/g++ and compile everything
> natively. Needless to say that it might be a little bit long given the
> performances of the gumstix. However, this is a working solution.
>
> The second solution is to run a gumstix image using qemu and in
> particular qemu-system-arm (package qemu-kvm-extras in ubuntu 9.10). To
> this end, you first need to setup a disk image, mount it, copy the file
> system created using the link above.
> #> qemu-img create overo-ros.img 2G
> #> mkdir overo-ros
> #> mount -o loop overo-ros.img overo-ros
> #> cd overo-ros
> #> sudo tar -zxvf /path/to/armel-rootfs-YYYYMMDDhhmm.tgz
>
> At this point the file system can be umounted and launched with qemu
> (get the kernel by following the instruction at
> http://people.canonical.com/~ogra/arm/qemu/README)
>
> #> umount overo-ros
> #> sudo qemu-system-arm -M versatilepb -kernel vmlinuz-2.6.28-versatile
> -hda overo-ros.img -m 256M -append "root=/dev/sda" -net nic -net user
>
> I have not tried booting the image while it is still mounted. I suspect
> it does not work so well.
>
> Once qemu has started the image, one can easily apt-get arm packages and
> update the image to get all the -dev packages. It is also possible to
> install gcc and compile all ros in the virtual gumstix. However, this
> takes forever, even longer than on the real system.
>
> However, getting qemu running is not a loss of time. Once all the -dev
> packets have been installed, the ubuntu image can be used to
> cross-compile. To this end, I first quit qemu, and remount overo-ros.
>
> The following will assume you have a a cross compiler installed, for
> instance through buildroot or open-embedded (check the gumstix wiki). We
> can then use the -sysroot option of gcc to compile using the overo-ros
> directory as the root of the filesystem (where /usr/include and /usr/lib
> are looked for). However, at the time of this writing libtool is not
> able to pass a -sysroot option to gcc, so I write a set of scripts for
> gcc, g++ and cpp, respectively called gcc-sysroot, g++-sysroot, and
> cpp-sysroot. The scripts are as follows:
>
> #!/bin/bash
> if test -n "$ARM_SYSROOT"
> then
> SYSROOT=--sysroot=$ARM_SYSROOT
> fi
> exec ${0/-sysroot/} $SYSROOT $*
>
> The same script can be used for all the executable as it find which
> binary to call based on how it was called.
>
> Once the scripts are defined, I have a special gumstix compilation
> environment:
> export GUMSTIXTOP=$HOME/overo-oe/
> export OVEROROOT=$HOME/overobuntu/overo-ros
> export
> PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$OVEROROOT/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:$OVEROROOT/usr/lib/pkgconfig
>
> export ARM_SYSROOT=$OVEROROOT
> export CROSSBIN=$GUMSTIXTOP/tmp/cross/armv7a/arm-angstrom-linux-gnueabi/bin
> export PATH=$CROSSBIN:$PATH
> export AR=$CROSSBIN/ar
> export CPP=$CROSSBIN/cpp-sysroot
> export CXX=$CROSSBIN/g++-sysroot
> export CC=$CROSSBIN/gcc-sysroot
>
>
> Once this is sourced in the current shell, you can call rosmake
> normally, and everything should be able to compile. Obviously, rosdep
> install does not work (you have to restart the qemu thing and call
> apt-get from there, or at least that the easy solution I found). I have
> all the laser and image processing stack working in particular, even
> libdc1394 with the usb drivers for the pointgrey cameras.
>
> Please note that you need to recall "cmake ." in all the directories.
> This can be done for instance with a script such as: (not fully tested)
>
> roscd
> find . -name "CMakeCache.txt" | while read line
> do
> cd ${line/build\/CMakeCache.txt/}
> cmake .
> cd -
> done
>
> Beware that a couple of binary must be compiled native and crossed
> (rospack, rosstack and rosmsg). To this end, compile them first native,
> save them (for instance renaming it rospack.intel), then compile them
> crossed, save the crossed compilation for later installation (for
> instance renaming it rospack.arm), then make a link to the correct
> executable for the current architecture, and mark these directory
> ROS_NOBUILD (touch ROS_NOBUILD). This also applies to libraries such as
> librospack.so and librosstack.so. I hope the WillowGarage team finds a
> way to decouple these libraries for cross-compilation.
>
> It might also be necessary to delete all the .la files installed with
> the -dev package in ubuntu on the arm image. These files refers libtool
> to some libraries in /usr/include and /usr/lib, without using the
> -sysroot option. gcc/g++ sees the risk and does not accept to compile
> then. This is a problem in particular for libjpeg (compressed image
> transport).
>
> Using all the above, I have ros working on both the gumstix overo and
> verdex. On the overo, using wifi G, the gumstix can downstream telemetry
> data and video data from an helicopter, using either raw images or
> jpeg-compressed images (not much framerate gain).
>
> On the verdex, I need to change the timeout in rospy/client.py (TBC) to
> 20seconds as it is the time the systems needs to get roscore up and
> running (The disk access performance are extremely bad on this older
> board). If someone wants to run ROS on a verdex, please contact me, and
> I'll check exactly what I had to change to make it happen. Not that the
> file system mentioned above works for a verdex.
>
> Check on http://support.skybotix.com/downloads.php for a full filesystem
> for the gumstix overo, with ros pre-compiled (Skybotix is a company
> selling micro-helicopter with an embedded gumstix, but the file system
> should be a good starting point for any gumstix application)
>
> I hope all this information helps...
>
--
| Radu Bogdan Rusu | http://rbrusu.com/
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