When working on the firmware for Super Mega Microbot’s improved actuators, I decided to try using mbed-os from ARM for the STM32 libraries instead of the HAL libraries.  I always found that the HAL libraries had a terrible API, and yet they still required that any non-trivial usage of the hardware devolve into register twiddling to be effective.  mbed presents a pretty nice C++ API for the features they do support, which is only a little less capable than HAL, but still makes it trivial to drop down to register twiddling when necessary (and includes all of the HAL by reference).

In “Building mjmech dependencies with bazel”, I described my rationale as it were for attempting to build all of the mjmech dependencies within bazel for cross compilation onto the raspberry pi.  mjmech has two big dependencies which were going to cause most of the transitive fallout:

• gstreamer - We use gstreamer to interface with the webcam, format RTSP streams for FPV on the control station, and to render the control station and heads up display.  Granted, not all of gstreamer is used, but we do depend on features that require ffmpeg and X11.
• opencv - The use of opencv had been minimal to non-existant previously, as we hadn’t actually done any computer vision on the robot itself.  However, one of the big motivations for switching to the raspberry pi in the first place was to at least to be able to do active target tracking onboard.

And then there are a few other direct dependencies that are “easy”, if nothing else because they have such few transitive dependencies.

The first version of the planetary gearbox as 3d printed from Shapeways required a fair amount of post-machining to get all the pieces to fit together.  I wanted to get to a point where I could just order some parts and have a reasonable expectation of them mostly working out of the box.  To make that happen, I’d need to get a better understanding of where the tolerances were coming from.

Understanding the problem

Shapeways provides a fair amount of documentation on the processes and accuracy you can expect generally.  Most of this is detailed in “Design rules and detail resolution for SLS 3D printing”, however the results there have some limitations.  Primarily, they are only applicable to the specific geometries tested.  Shrinkage is qualified as +- 0.15% of the largest dimension, and is likely influenced by the exact printed geometry.  Secondarily, in the documented tests, the designers had full control over the part alignment in the print.  The standard shapeways platform does not allow you to orient parts, you are at the whim of their technicians where the Z axis will end up.

Previously, I set up bazel to be able to cross compile for the raspberry pi using an extracted sysroot.  That sysroot was very minimal, basically just glibc and the kernel headers.  The software used for SMMB has many dependencies beyond that though, including some heavyweight ones such as gstreamer and I needed some solution for building against them.

Options

There were two basic options:

1. Install all the dependencies I cared about on an actual raspberry pi, and extract them into the sysroot.
2. Build all the dependencies I cared about using bazel’s external projects mechanism.

The former would certainly be quicker in the short term, at the expense of needing to check in or otherwise version a very large sysroot.  It would also be annoying to update, as I would need to keep around a physical raspberry pi and continually reset it to zero in order to generate suitably pristine sysroots.

In the previous post, I described the motivation for switching the mjmech build system to bazel.  For that to be useful with Super Mega Microbot, I first had to get a toolchain configured for bazel such that it could produce binaries that would run on the raspberry pi.

All the work in this post is publicly available on github: https://github.com/mjbots/rpi_bazel

Compiler and sysroot

First, I needed to pick the compiler I would be using and how to get the target system libraries available for cross compilation.  In the past I’ve always done the gcc/binutils/gnu everything cross toolchain dance, however here I thought I would try something a bit more reproducible and see if I could make clang work.  Amazingly, a single clang binary supports all possible target types!  clang-6, which can be had through a PPA on Ubuntu 16.04 and natively on Ubuntu 18.04 supports it out of the box.

The first piece I tackled when switching to the Raspberry Pi 3B+ for Super Mega Microbot was building our existing control software.  The software we used for the 2016 Robogames is largely C++ and was built with SCons, https://github.com/mjbots/mjmech/.  For all our previous platforms for both Savage Solder and SMMB, we had just built the software on the device itself, which while a little slow, was certainly convenient and required very little sophistication from the build system.  Raspian is debian based, so this shouldn’t be hard, right?

One of the major challenges SMMB had in Robogames 2016 was in overall walking speed.  It is using HerkuleX DRS-201 servos, which are roughly comparable to the Dynamixel servos that other entrants were using, but the physical geometry of the robot is such that is hard to get it to move quickly with that class of servos.  The center of gravity is too high, especially with the gimbal mounted turret. The R-Team bots all use very low slung machines that scoot along.  I could go that route, but why do things the easy way?

Super Mega Microbot, that beloved and neglected creation, is due for a facelift. The biggest challenge we had at the last competition was the instability of the USB bus on the odroid-U2 when we had both a USB camera and USB 5GHz wifi adapter attached. Cue 2.5 years of waiting, and one aborted attempt, and it looks like the problem is solved!

The aborted attempt

The challenge in this problem is that almost no single board computers in the odroid-ish form factor have both: