This document describes the setup process for a development environment machine. This includes the base station, as well as any other machine (e.g. a team member's laptop) which is used for ROS development.
Prerequisites
You'll need various software tools before you can start working on the WR software system.
As of 2023, the dependencies are built-in to a Docker container. This container is not deployed to hardware, but facilitates developer work. Instructions for setting up the Docker container are in `/docs/setup_dev_docker.md`.
Installing Linux ('Prefer Docker')
This is done automatically as part of the Docker container. The following steps are useful if you have to do it manually.
ROS Noetic runs on Ubuntu 20.04. You could use a software to emulate Ubuntu 20.04 (i.e. VirtualBox, VMWare, Parallels, WSL (in rare circumstances for hardware)). This is typically less efficient than using native hardware, but provides a fairly complete emulation. This, however, is largely unnecessary. Developers typically work with simulation or manual ROS manipulation to exercise their code. This does not require direct hardware interaction, and a tighter development cycle would lead to faster development. Virtualizing hardware or integrating the hardware to the developer machine often duplicates work when integrating with the WRover. The Docker container handles the setup of the development system and leaves specific hardware configuration for the WRover.
From here onwards, it is assumed that you have some flavour of Ubuntu 20.04 installed.
Installing Python 3
This is done automatically as part of the Docker container. The following steps are useful if you have to do it manually (on hardware):
A significant portion of the WRover software system is built on Python 3, so you'll need to ensure that it, as well as some necessary packages, are installed. Most Ubuntu 20.04 distributions should come with Python 3 by default, and you can check this using the command:
You'll want to ensure that pip, Python's package manager, is installed, since that's what we'll be using to install most Python packages. This can be done using the commands:
Next, you'll want to use pip to install virtualenv, a tool that lets us isolate separate Python workspaces. This can be done using the command:
Installing ROS
This is done automatically as part of the Docker container. The following steps are useful if you have to do it manually (on hardware):
The WRover software system is built using the Robotics Operating System (ROS) framework, which you'll need to install. See the official instructions on the ROS wiki for more details. You can check that everything has installed properly using the commands:
Setting Up the Workspace
This is done automatically as part of the Docker container. The following steps are useful if you have to do it manually (on hardware):
This repository consists of the ROS catkin workspace for the WRover software system. You'll want to clone the repo to wherever you wish to store your workspaces (conventionally, this would be ~/catkin_ws). Once you have a local copy, you'll want to open a terminal in the workspace. To initialize the workspace, run the command:
This will initialize the catkin project and create the Python virtual environment. Next, you'll want to run the command:
This will configure your current terminal's environment to work in this workspace. Now, you can run the command:
This will download any dependencies, then build the whole project. Once this is finished, your workspace setup is complete!
Every time you want to work in the workspace, you'll have to run source setup.sh again to set up your shell with the workspace environment. This is equivalent to sourcing the devel/setup.bash and venv/bin/activate scripts, which will respectively configure the ROS package path and activate the Python venv. Alternatively, you can do this automatically in your .bashrc if you don't anticipate working in any other ROS workspaces.
Working in the Workspace
Sourcing <tt>setup.sh</tt>
This is done automatically as part of the Docker container. The following steps are useful if you have to do it manually (on hardware):
When working on the software system, you'll want to ensure that your terminal window is configured to work in the catkin workspace. This is done by sourcing the setup.sh script, which is done using one of the commands:
If successful, you should see "`(venv)`" somewhere in your terminal's prompt line, which indicates that the workspace's Python virtual environment has been activated. If sourcing setup.sh for every new terminal is too tedious, you can automatically do it by adding the command to .bashrc. This could be done, for example, using the command:
Note that if you intend to use multiple catkin workspaces on the same machine, this might not be the best idea, as you'll always automatically be put into that one workspace.
Building the Workspace
To build the workspace, you can either use assemble.py or directly invoke catkin_make. Using assemble.py, you would run one of:
The offline and force modes cannot be used simultaneously.
The build task of assemble.py checks dependencies, then delegates to catkin_make. If you don't want to bother with dependencies, you can just invoke catkin_make directly. For more info on assemble.py, check out the build_tools.md document.
