After OpenCV, the other major dependency the mjmech software has, which is necessary to complete the raspberry pi 3b+ bazel build setup, was gstreamer. Unlike the previous dependencies, this one is a doozy – gstreamer has an enormous transitive dependency set. Additionally, we needed to use its ffmpeg wrappers, which brings in more dependencies.

In this post, I’ll just try to map out the dependencies that we ended up actually needing, so that they can be tackled one by one.

The next level of difficulty in bazel-ifying packages for mjmech was opencv.

First, for the impatient, Apache 2.0 licensed sources are available on github: https://github.com/mjbots/bazel_deps/tree/master/tools/workspace/opencv

OpenCV’s native build system consists of nearly 200 cmake files with over 20,000 total lines of code, plus assorted helper scripts and prototype files which are substituted into.  Fortunately, I didn’t need to support the full complexity of the opencv build system.  Things I didn’t bother to touch:

This is part N in a series describing how I created the bazel infrastructure to build all the third party packages for mjmech.  Previously we have:

• Building mjmech software with bazel
• Configuring bazel to cross compile for the rpi3
• Building mjmech dependencies with bazel
• First bazel-ified packages

We left off with the first, very simple packages configured to build with bazel.  In this installment we will tackle those that require at least minimal configuration, i.e. those that have some files which are normally generated as part of the build process.

In “Building mjmech dependencies with bazel”, I described my rationale as it were for attempting to build all of the mjmech dependencies within bazel for cross compilation onto the raspberry pi.  mjmech has two big dependencies which were going to cause most of the transitive fallout:

• gstreamer - We use gstreamer to interface with the webcam, format RTSP streams for FPV on the control station, and to render the control station and heads up display.  Granted, not all of gstreamer is used, but we do depend on features that require ffmpeg and X11.
• opencv - The use of opencv had been minimal to non-existant previously, as we hadn’t actually done any computer vision on the robot itself.  However, one of the big motivations for switching to the raspberry pi in the first place was to at least to be able to do active target tracking onboard.

And then there are a few other direct dependencies that are “easy”, if nothing else because they have such few transitive dependencies.

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.

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?

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: