TipsAndTricks/Creating Recipes for ROS modules

Introduction

Robot Operating System (ROS) isn't an OS but a set of modules for robotics applications that interact via a pub/sub interface. Thanks to meta-ros you can add a wide range of ROS modules to your OS build. But how do you add your own ROS module? This article covers creating a recipe for a ROS module. For this article we'll use the vectornav module as an example. We'll also assume you already have meta-ros in your bblayers.conf.

Starting with "devtool add"

Standard practice for a creating a recipe is use devtool add. The github project doesn't have any releases, so let's use the git repo.

$ devtool add https://github.com/dawonn/vectornav

This completes OK, let's take a look at the recipe.

$ devtool edit-recipe vectornav

# Recipe created by recipetool
# This is the basis of a recipe and may need further editing in order to be fully functional.
# (Feel free to remove these comments when editing.)

# WARNING: the following LICENSE and LIC_FILES_CHKSUM values are best guesses - it is
# your responsibility to verify that the values are complete and correct.
LICENSE = "MIT"
LIC_FILES_CHKSUM = "file://vnccpplib/LICENSE.txt;md5=a3e2f266f2adb30b4ae17db437fa9727"

SRC_URI = "git://github.com/dawonn/vectornav;protocol=https"

# Modify these as desired
PV = "1.0+git${SRCPV}"
SRCREV = "497173f3ddbe21216d77d3b2021a5ef48a17ec4a"

S = "${WORKDIR}/git"

# NOTE: unable to map the following CMake package dependencies: catkin
inherit cmake

# Specify any options you want to pass to cmake using EXTRA_OECMAKE:
EXTRA_OECMAKE = ""

Note the comment

# NOTE: unable to map the following CMake package dependencies: catkin

And sure enough, the build fails as the comment predicted.

$ devtool build vectornav
| CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:7 (find_package):
|   By not providing "Findcatkin.cmake" in CMAKE_MODULE_PATH this project has
|   asked CMake to find a package configuration file provided by "catkin", but
|   CMake did not find one.

Assuming you've worked with ROS, you'll know that it builds with a cmake based tool called catkin. This is usually installed as a developer package so some Yocto work will need to be done to build the builder. This seems like a tough task, so let's see how other ROS modules have done this.

Understanding Existing ROS Recipes

The build failed because ROS uses a cmake based built tool called catkin and recipetool (the tool invoked by 'devtool add') couldn't figure this out. Let's look at a an existing meta-ros recipe zeroconf-msgs to see how they figure this out.

DESCRIPTION = "General ros communications used by the various zeroconf implementations."
SECTION = "devel"
LICENSE = "BSD"
LIC_FILES_CHKSUM = "file://package.xml;beginline=8;endline=8;md5=5ee5b8b046ae48ad94a2037ca953a67b"

DEPENDS = "std-msgs message-generation"

SRC_URI = "https://github.com/stonier/${ROS_SPN}/archive/${PV}.tar.gz;downloadfilename=${ROS_SP}.tar.gz"
SRC_URI[md5sum] = "38e89e637f855c2ea0e8cb65c02dfd08"
SRC_URI[sha256sum] = "a5bfd788bc2e2aefb07cb3a302a25cbeef2ce7e931a3a273cb1ae9669645a696"

S = "${WORKDIR}/${ROS_SP}"

inherit catkin

The first things to note is that LIC_FILES_CHKSUM refers to package.xml, a key catkin file. This includes the licence and ROS dependencies, let's take a look at it

<package>
  <name>zeroconf_msgs</name>
  <version>0.2.1</version>
  <description>
    General ros communications used by the various zeroconf implementations.    
  </description>
  <maintainer email="d.stonier@gmail.com">Daniel Stonier</maintainer>
  <license>BSD</license>  

  <url type="website">http://www.ros.org/wiki/zeroconf_msgs</url>
  <url type="repository">https://github.com/stonier/zeroconf_msgs</url>
  <url type="bugtracker">https://github.com/stonier/zeroconf_msgs/issues</url>
  <author email="d.stonier@gmail.com">Daniel Stonier</author>

  <buildtool_depend>catkin</buildtool_depend>
  <build_depend>message_generation</build_depend>
  <build_depend>std_msgs</build_depend>

  <run_depend>message_runtime</run_depend>
  <run_depend>std_msgs</run_depend>

  <export>
    <architecture_independent/>
  </export>in the <tt>run_depend</tt> that are not also in <tt>
</package>

There is some useful information to create a recipe. Let's create a mapping between package.xml tags and recipe variables.

package.xml Tag	Recipe directive	Comment
name	PN	devtool got this right
version	PV	devtool missed this
description	SUMMARY	devtool missed this. This should map to SUMMARY, not DESCRIPTION which adds detail
license	LICENSE	devtool got this right
url	HOMEPAGE	type="website". Seems to be an optional tag
url	SRC_URI	type="repository". Seems to be an optional tag
buildtool_depend	inherit	Will always be catkin(?), which inherits cmake
build_depend	DEPENDS	devtool missed this
runs_depend	RDEPENDS_{PN}	This should only contain entries that are not already in build_depend

Updating The vectornav Recipe

So let's take a look at the package.xml for our module

<package>
  <name>vectornav</name>
  <version>0.1.0</version>
  <description>ROS interface for the VectorNav INS/GPS</description>

  <maintainer email="dereck@gmail.com">Dereck Wonnacott</maintainer>

  <license>MIT</license>

  <!-- <url type="website">http://ros.org/wiki/vectornav</url> -->

  <author email="dereck@gmail.com">Dereck Wonnacott</author>

  <buildtool_depend>catkin</buildtool_depend>
  
  <build_depend>roscpp</build_depend>  
  <build_depend>geometry_msgs</build_depend>
  <build_depend>sensor_msgs</build_depend>
  <build_depend>tf</build_depend>
  
  <run_depend>roscpp</run_depend>
  <run_depend>sensor_msgs</run_depend>
  <run_depend>geometry_msgs</run_depend>
  <run_depend>tf</run_depend>
  
  <!-- Maintainer Note:
      The vnccpplib directory is from http://www.vectornav.com/support/downloads
      I removed the version string from the directory name, sanitized file 
      permissions, and removed all but the src and include directories.
   -->
</package>

And map it to recipe directives

Recipe entry	Value
PV	0.1.0
SUMMARY	ROS interface for the VectorNav INS/GPS
LICENSE	MIT
HOMEPAGE	http://ros.org/wiki/vectornav
inherit	catkin
DEPENDS	roscpp geometry_msgs sensor_msgs tf
RDEPENDS

Now let's update rhe recipe the devtool created with these values