Missing Format Drivers

[Tucker Whitesides]

Hi pylidar community! 

I was hoping someone could help me get pylidar operational.  I cannot get pylidar to correctly find the Rigel drivers and I think its because the paths are incorrect.  Do I only need to have the variables RIVLIB_ROOT and RIWAVELIB_ROOT defined as environment variables or should each of those be added to my path?  Plus how deep into the library does the root need to be or is a path to the unzipped download sufficient?  Plus is there a recommendation on which version of RiVlib or RiWaveLib to use?

When I attempt to run the pylidar_test, testsuite8 is skipped because pylidar cannot find the libraries.

Skipping testsuite8 due to missing format driver RIEGL

Thanks a bunch, Tucker

[gilling...@gmail.com]

Hi Tucker,

What OS are you using? RIVLIB_ROOT and RIWAVELIB_ROOT need only to be set while building. Are you using the Conda packages? If so, you don't need to do this step again as the packages are already built with Riegl support - but you do need the Riegl libraries available on your machine since they can't be redistributed.

Yes the library has to be unzipped and currently version 2.3.0 is supported. You need to add the path to the riwavelib 'lib' (or 'bin' for Windows) subdirectory to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH (or PATH on Windows) environment variable. On Linux, I have riwavelib unzipped in my home directory, and use the following command to add it to $LD_LIBRARY_PATH:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/riwavelib_wfm-2_3_0-x86_64-linux-gcc44/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

The equivalent for Windows would be:

set PATH=c:\rivlib-2_3_0-x86_64-windows-vc140\bin;%PATH%

Note that if you are on Windows you have to get riwavelib built with the same version of Visual Studio as Python. This is MSVC 2010 (also called vc100) for Python 3.4 and MSVC 2015 (also called vc140) for Python 3.5. Riegl don't supply libs for MSVC 2008 (Python 2.7) so Python 2.7 won't work with Riegl files on Windows.

Hope that helps.

Sam.