Previously, I set up bazel to be able to cross compile for the raspberry pi using an extracted sysroot.  That sysroot was very minimal, basically just glibc and the kernel headers.  The software used for SMMB has many dependencies beyond that though, including some heavyweight ones such as gstreamer and I needed some solution for building against them.

Options

There were two basic options:

1. Install all the dependencies I cared about on an actual raspberry pi, and extract them into the sysroot.
2. Build all the dependencies I cared about using bazel’s external projects mechanism.

The former would certainly be quicker in the short term, at the expense of needing to check in or otherwise version a very large sysroot.  It would also be annoying to update, as I would need to keep around a physical raspberry pi and continually reset it to zero in order to generate suitably pristine sysroots.

In the previous post, I described the motivation for switching the mjmech build system to bazel.  For that to be useful with Super Mega Microbot, I first had to get a toolchain configured for bazel such that it could produce binaries that would run on the raspberry pi.

All the work in this post is publicly available on github: https://github.com/mjbots/rpi_bazel

Compiler and sysroot

First, I needed to pick the compiler I would be using and how to get the target system libraries available for cross compilation.  In the past I’ve always done the gcc/binutils/gnu everything cross toolchain dance, however here I thought I would try something a bit more reproducible and see if I could make clang work.  Amazingly, a single clang binary supports all possible target types!  clang-6, which can be had through a PPA on Ubuntu 16.04 and natively on Ubuntu 18.04 supports it out of the box.

The first piece I tackled when switching to the Raspberry Pi 3B+ for Super Mega Microbot was building our existing control software.  The software we used for the 2016 Robogames is largely C++ and was built with SCons, https://github.com/mjbots/mjmech/.  For all our previous platforms for both Savage Solder and SMMB, we had just built the software on the device itself, which while a little slow, was certainly convenient and required very little sophistication from the build system.  Raspian is debian based, so this shouldn’t be hard, right?

One of the major challenges SMMB had in Robogames 2016 was in overall walking speed.  It is using HerkuleX DRS-201 servos, which are roughly comparable to the Dynamixel servos that other entrants were using, but the physical geometry of the robot is such that is hard to get it to move quickly with that class of servos.  The center of gravity is too high, especially with the gimbal mounted turret. The R-Team bots all use very low slung machines that scoot along.  I could go that route, but why do things the easy way?

Super Mega Microbot, that beloved and neglected creation, is due for a facelift. The biggest challenge we had at the last competition was the instability of the USB bus on the odroid-U2 when we had both a USB camera and USB 5GHz wifi adapter attached. Cue 2.5 years of waiting, and one aborted attempt, and it looks like the problem is solved!

The aborted attempt

The challenge in this problem is that almost no single board computers in the odroid-ish form factor have both: