GummyBear's profile - activity

I realize this answer is coming probably a month too late for you, but if you're still working on cross compiling ROS, here's a few tips:

Don't follow those instructions you found, because they are very old and outdated. I started with that document, but quickly found it wasn't relevant. Basically, you want to cross-compile a bare-bones ROS from source and then cross compile your own ROS packages. I have done this exact thing with ROS Hydro, targeting an Odroid U3 running Ubuntu 12.11. I can outline the steps for you here, but since you have a different system, details will change. The way I figured things out, you basically need to have cross-compiled versions of the dependencies for anything you want to cross-compile. At some basic level, you will install a toolchain, which should include cross-compiled standard libraries. Many dependencies you will need to build yourself, however.

Here's what you're going to need to do:

Step 1. Install your cross compiling toolchain. I don't know anything about the Wandboard, but it may use the same cross compiler toolchain that I used for the Odroid; I know the beaglebone uses the same one (g++-arm-linux-gnueabihf)

Step 2. Cross compile ROS dependencies. For bare-bones ROS Hydro, I needed the following dependencies: boost (1.56.0), Python (2.7.3), Bzip2, Poco, uuid, libtinyxml. Depending on what ROS packages you need, you might have different dependencies.

Step 3. After you cross compile all of those packages, you need to cross compile ROS. You basically just follow the building ROS from source instructions ( http://wiki.ros.org/hydro/Installatio... ). The only major difference that you will have is when you build, you want to pass in a toolchain.cmake file, which will instruct cmake to use the cross compiling tools instead of your typical system tools. For a bare-bones ROS, use the following rosinstall_generator and wstool commands to get the necessary source code (modified for your needs, of course):

$ rosinstall_generator ros_comm <ros_pkg_1> <ros_pkg_2> ... <ros_pkg_n> --rosdistro hydro --deps --wet-only --tar > hydro-my_ros_config-wet.rosinstall

$ wstool init -j8 src hydro-my_ros_config-wet.rosinstall

Now, when you build ROS, you should use a rostoolchain.cmake file that looks something like this:

#File rostoolchain.cmake
set(CMAKE_SYSTEM_NAME Linux)
set(CMAKE_C_COMPILER arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc)
set(CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++)
set(CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH /path/to/cross/compile/build/environment)

# Have to set this one to BOTH, to allow CMake to find rospack
set(CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH_MODE_PROGRAM BOTH)
set(CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH_MODE_LIBRARY ONLY)
set(CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH_MODE_INCLUDE ONLY)
set(CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH_MODE_PACKAGE ONLY)

This file just tells cmake how to look for things it needs. Think about CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH as the starting point for your system. Cmake won't search down any path that doesn't begin with CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH. So if you have boost libraries installed on your system under /usr/lib and you also cross compiled boost to /home/user/crosscompile/boost/. If your CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH is set to /home/user/crosscompile, then it can find the cross compiled boost, which is what you need if you want to cross ... (more)