ROS SDK tools for host platform

[Terry Farnham]

I am needing to have the ROS and catkin tools built and deployed to the host systems SDK in order to enable cross platform development on the host machine.  I am not sure where to begin modifying recipes in order to do so.

[Christoph Schultz]

Hi Terry,

not sure if I got your problem, maybe you can be a bit more specific. The idea of this meta-ros is to avoid having a to setup a full fledged catkin cross-compile setup. You basically select the right recipes from the repo, and the Yocto environment will take care of all steps necessary to cross compile (and install) the packages on an image. This image can be installed to the device or you can reinstall it from an automatically created package.

If you are looking for a development platform (versus using ROS stock-modules only) you can just setup a catkin ws on your host machine and develop everything locally. When satisfied with the result create a zip (maybe there is a way to avoid this step and I just haven't found it yet...) and create a new recipe pointing to this newly created zip instantiating the catkin tools. You can add the recipe to the image and bitbake will cross compile the code contained in the zip file.

First steps have been a bit bumpy, but now it works quite well for my setup.

Best regards
Christoph

[Terry Farnham]

Thank you for your reply.  Knowing that I should be able to use the host catkin/ros tools to invoke the cross compiler gives me a path to go down.  I believe I probably need to try to prevent the version of python included in the Yocto created SDK from being used.  I'm going to try going down that road and reply further if I still am encountering problems.

[Terry Farnham]

Indeed, removing the usage of the version of python that is deployed by the Yocto build into the SDK solved my problem and made building the ROS applications much easier.