CDFF-Dev

CDFF-Dev provides tools to develop, test, visualize, and perform analysis on data fusion products. It includes tools such as data log replay, visualization tools, and data analysis tools. None of it is deployed on the target system.

CDFF-Dev was initiated and is currently developed by the InFuse consortium. The following institutes contributed to the software:

• Robotics Innovation Center of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Bremen
• Space Mechatronics Systems Technology Laboratory of the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow

     

Documentation

The overall concept and conventions are described in these documents:

• CDFF-Dev Architecture and User Documentation
• Guide for creating a DFN
• Guide for creating a DFPC

Dependencies of CDFF-Dev

The recommended way of installing all dependencies of CDFF-Dev is autoproj. See autoproj installation instructions for details.

The CDFF's Dev component, available in this CDFF_dev repository, depends on the CDFF's Core and Support components, available in the CDFF repository. In addition to the EnviRe components that are required in CDFF, CDFF-Dev requires the simplified EnviRe visualizer interface. It also requires the Python 3 interpreter, the Python 3 headers, the Python 3 package manager, Graphviz, and the following Python packages:

• PyYAML
• Jinja2
• Cython
• NumPy
• msgpack-python
• pandas
• pydot
• memory_profiler
• PyQt 4
• OpenCV
• GDAL

On Ubuntu 16.04 you can install those requirements as follow:

# Python interpreter, headers, package manager, Qt, and Graphviz
$ sudo apt-get install python3 python3-dev python3-pip python3-pyqt4 graphviz python3-gdal

# Install Python packages and a newer version of the package manager
# in /usr/local/{bin,lib/python3.X/dist-packages} for all users
$ sudo -H pip3 install --upgrade pip
$ sudo -H pip3 install -r requirements.txt

# Or install Python packages and a newer version of the package manager
# in $HOME/.local/{bin,lib/python3.X/site-packages} for the current user
$ pip3 install --user --upgrade pip
$ pip3 install --user -r requirements.txt

Or you can do without installing anything and instead use CDFF-Dev inside a Docker container started from the InFuse Docker image. It is the same image as for CDFF-Core and CDFF-Support, and comes with all the necessary dependencies. You only need to provide your local clones of the CDFF and CDFF_dev repositories. Have a look at this section in the documentation on the CDFF repository. With an adequately-defined alias, you can start a container as follow:

user@computer:~$ docker cdff-dev
Found CDFF-core and CDFF-support: /opt/cdff/
Found compiled ASN.1 data types:  /opt/cdff/Common/Types/C/
Found CDFF-dev: /opt/cdff-dev/
Setting up CDFF-dev...
Obtaining file:///opt/cdff-dev
Installing collected packages: cdff-dev
  Running setup.py develop for cdff-dev
Successfully installed cdff-dev
Setting up CDFF-dev: done
user@cdff-dev:/$

Unit testing CDFF-Dev requires additional Python packages, see further.

Compiling and installing CDFF-Dev

After you have built (and optionally installed) the CDFF's Core and Support components, you can compile and install the CDFF's Dev component as a Python package:

# Install CDFF-Dev in /usr/local/{bin,lib/python3.X/dist-packages} for all users
$ sudo -H CDFFPATH=/path/to/CDFF pip3 install --editable /path/to/CDFF_dev

# Or install it in $HOME/.local/{bin,lib/python3.X/site-packages} for the current user
$ CDFFPATH=/path/to/CDFF pip3 install --user --editable /path/to/CDFF_dev

When using the InFuse Docker image, compilation as root is performed automatically at container startup, and CDFF-Dev is of course installed inside the container, not on your hard disk.

Notes:

• Compiling CDFF-Dev produces a number of build files in /path/to/CDFF_dev:

  build/
  cdff_dev/__pycache__/
  cdff_dev.egg-info/
  cdff_types.cpp
  cdff_types*.so
  

  They can all be removed except cdff_types*.so and cdff_envire*.so.

• Compiling CDFF-Dev as root means that the aforementioned files and directories are owned by root. If they are not removed or chowned, subsequently compiling as a normal user fails because the build process isn't allowed to overwrite them.

• About the -H flag (--set-home): the Python package manager caches data in $XDG_CACHE_HOME/pip, where $XDG_CACHE_HOME is $HOME/.cache by default, where $HOME is the home directory of the superuser only if sudo -H is used, since sudo does not change the home directory by default.

  Running pip3 through sudo without the -H flag disables this caching to avoid writing root-owned files to the cache directory of the current user. Run pip3 through sudo -H to write those files to the cache directory of the superuser instead.

Using CDFF-Dev's DFN code generator

Once CDFF-Dev is compiled and installed, you can run the DFN code generator as follow:

# Provide the path to the CDFF on the command line
$ dfn_template_generator --cdffpath=/path/to/CDFF/ dfn_desc.yaml [output_dir]

# Or through an environment variable
$ export CDFFPATH=/path/to/CDFF/
$ dfn_template_generator dfn_desc.yaml [output_dir]

# Or through a hint file in the current directory
$ echo -n /path/to/CDFF/ > cdffpath
$ dfn_template_generator dfn_desc.yaml [output_dir]

# If you don't do either of those things, you will be asked for the path
# and it will be written to a hint file in the current directory
$ dfn_template_generator dfn_desc.yaml
Please enter the path to CDFF:

In these commands:

• dfn_desc.yaml is the DFN description file.

• output_dir is the directory where the generated C++ files and the generated Python bindings are written. It will be created if it doesn't exist, and the default value is the current directory.

  Existing DFN implementation files (dfnname.{hpp,cpp}) are not overwritten. Existing DFN interface files (dfnnameInterface.{hpp,cpp}) and existing Python bindings (dfnname.{pxd,pyx} and _dfnname.pxd) are overwritten.

• /path/to/CDFF/ is the directory that contains your local clone of the CDFF repository (CDFF-Core and CDFF-Support). It is looked for on the command line, in the CDFFPATH environment variable, and in the hint file cdffpath in the current directory, in this order of precedence.

Other Command Line Tools

CDFF-Dev provides more command line tools than just the code generators. They are documented in the User Documentation of CDFF-Dev:

• dfpc_diagram is explained in Section 1.1.2
• Utilities for log data handling are described in Section 3

Testing CDFF-Dev

Unit testing CDFF-Dev requires the following additional Python packages:

• nose
• nose2

You can install them as follow (already installed in the InFuse Docker image):

# Install nose and nose2 in /usr/local/{bin,lib/python3.X/dist-packages} for all users
$ sudo -H pip3 install nose nose2

# Or install them in $HOME/.local/{bin,lib/python3.X/site-packages} for the current user
$ pip3 install --user nose nose2

Then to run the unit tests:

nosetests -sv cdff_dev cdff_dev/extensions test

Notes:

• Compiling and running the unit tests produces a number of test-related files in /path/to/CDFF_dev:

  build/temp.*/test/test_output/
  cdff_dev/__pycache__/
  cdff_dev/test/__pycache__/
  test/__pycache__/
  <extension>*.so
  

  If deleted they will be generated again at the next unit test run.

• If CDFF-dev was compiled as root, the directory build/temp.*/ is owned by root and non world-writable, so the subdirectory test/ cannot be created by a normal user, consequently tests that write to build/temp.*/test/test_output/ fail.

  Work around this issue by adding the writable mode bit for "others" to build/temp.*/, or chowning it to your user.

• You can check the test coverage if you install the pip package coverage and run the tests with

  nosetests -sv cdff_dev cdff_dev/extensions test --with-coverage --cover-html
  

  This will generate a folder cover/ that contains an HTML report of the code coverage. You can open the file cover/index.html with a browser.

Contributing to CDFF-Dev

It is not allowed to push to the master branch. To contribute a new feature, please develop it in a feature branch, push the feature branch, and open a merge request.

License

CDFF-Dev is released under GPL v3 or later.

Copyright

Copyright 2017-2019, DFKI GmbH / Robotics Innovation Center, University of Strathclyde / Space Mechatronics Systems Technology Laboratory