arduino-resources

General info

This repository is needed to generate all resources, that are used to compile Arduino programs in the OpenRoberta Lab for

• Arduino Mega (avr-gcc)
• Arduino Nano (avr-gcc)
• Arduino Uno (avr-gcc)
• Arduino Uno Wifi Rev.2 (avr-gcc)
• BOB3 (avr-gcc) **
• Bot'n Roll (avr-gcc)
• Festo Bionics4Education (xtensa-esp32-elf)
• mBot (avr-gcc)
• senseBox (arm-none-eabi)
• STM32 Nucleo-64 (arm-none-eabi)
• Arduino nano33ble (arm-none-eabi)
• ROB3RTA (avr-gcc) **

** BOB3 and ROB3RTA library files and scripts are downloaded directly from vendor, hence no files are checked in here.

The resources generated are

• cores,
• libraries (libora.a archive),
• header files and
• a script, that runs the compiler and linker in the Lab.

Details

Sketches that are located in their respective folders contain header includes and are processed by arduino-cli to find all dependencies and compile the libraries. Once this lengthy process is done, the results can be reused.

The main reason for creating this repository is to to speed up the compilation in the Lab. To achieve this, unnecessary (re-)compilations are avoided by compiling everything that could be referenced in the Lab once and storing the object files in libraries.

For a stable build the resources are generated inside a docker container. arduino-cli is used to download most of the compilers and resources.

When the container is built, a shell script generates the libraries and stores them together with the header files in the directory /tmp/arduino-release.

unowifirev2 and sensebox need to link with the variant.c(pp).o in addition to the core, otherwise nothing will be executed on the board. The Nucleo-64 board resources ship with newer versions of CMSIS and arm-none-eabi, but the older versions provided by the samd packages seem to suffice. It also requires explicit linking with variant.cpp.o, PeripheralPins.c.o and syscalls.c.o, the latter being actually already included in the libora.a.

LTO support was turned off for uno, nano, mega, botnroll, mbot and unowifirev2 boards due to errors when using libraries on a Raspberry Pi.

Automatic build

The resources are automatically built and released using GitHub Actions when creating a commit with this pattern: v*. Use as suffix the day of the commit, v2020.12.29 to ease analysis of problems. A zip file containing all of the libraries and scripts is created and available through the release. This is the recommended way to generate the resources. The pom.xml, which is executed when the resources in the git repo ora-cc-rsc are built, expects a zip file as it is generated by the automatic build.

Adding new libraries

In order to add new libraries simply put the include directive with the needed header in the respective sketch. Do not forget to provide the library itself through arduino-cli in the Dockerfile or copy the library into RobotArdu/libraries. In some cases additional include directories, or precompiled linking targets, may need to be added to the robot specific build scripts. In the wiki of the openroberta-lab there is a more detailed description about adding libraries.

Manual build - avoid this

To generate the docker image:

docker build -t arduino-resources -f Dockerfile .

Anti-Virus may slow down the build due to scanning every intermediatefile. If the cloned repositories of ora-cc-rsc and arduino-resources are in the same directory, one replaces the arduino resources in ora-cc-rsc by:

rm -rf ../ora-cc-rsc/RobotArdu/arduino-resources && mkdir ../ora-cc-rsc/RobotArdu/arduino-resources
docker rm arduinolibs
docker create --name arduinolibs arduino-resources
docker cp arduinolibs:/tmp/arduino-release/. ../ora-cc-rsc/RobotArdu/arduino-resources

Quickly testing libraries - avoid this

In case a library needs to be included quickly for some initial tests and should not be included here directly, it can also be added manually to the wanted build script (replace avr with appropriate compiler for platform).

• Copy the library into the RobotArdu/arduino-resources/includes folder in ora-cc-rsc
• Duplicate the whole avr-g++ compiler call and replace the last line of it with $LIB_INCLUDE_DIR/<path-to-lib>/<lib-name>.cpp -o $BUILD_DIR/<lib-name>.o
• Add $BUILD_DIR/<lib-name>.o before $BUILD_DIR/$PROGRAM_NAME.o in the avr-gcc linker call
• Add the appropriate include in the source code editor, e.g #include <lib-name/src/lib-name.h> and use it

** Remarks about warnings

The warning cp: -r not specified; omitting directory './RobotArdu/libraries/ArduinoSTL/src/abi' can be disregarded because the abi folder is not needed at all.

The warning:

In file included from /opt/ora-cc-rsc/RobotArdu/libraries/SparkFun_LSM6DS3_Breakout/src/SparkFunLSM6DS3.cpp:32:0:
/opt/ora-cc-rsc/RobotArdu/hardware/additional/arduino/hardware/megaavr/1.8.5/libraries/Wire/src/Wire.h: In member function 'status_t LSM6DS3Core::readRegisterRegion(uint8_t*, uint8_t, uint8_t)':
/opt/ora-cc-rsc/RobotArdu/hardware/additional/arduino/hardware/megaavr/1.8.5/libraries/Wire/src/Wire.h:62:13: note: candidate 1: uint8_t TwoWire::requestFrom(int, int)
     uint8_t requestFrom(int, int);
             ^~~~~~~~~~~
/opt/ora-cc-rsc/RobotArdu/hardware/additional/arduino/hardware/megaavr/1.8.5/libraries/Wire/src/Wire.h:60:13: note: candidate 2: virtual uint8_t TwoWire::requestFrom(uint8_t, size_t)
     uint8_t requestFrom(uint8_t, size_t);
             ^~~~~~~~~~~
/opt/ora-cc-rsc/RobotArdu/hardware/additional/arduino/hardware/megaavr/1.8.5/libraries/Wire/src/Wire.h: In member function 'status_t LSM6DS3Core::readRegister(uint8_t*, uint8_t)':
/opt/ora-cc-rsc/RobotArdu/hardware/additional/arduino/hardware/megaavr/1.8.5/libraries/Wire/src/Wire.h:62:13: note: candidate 1: uint8_t TwoWire::requestFrom(int, int)
     uint8_t requestFrom(int, int);
             ^~~~~~~~~~~
/opt/ora-cc-rsc/RobotArdu/hardware/additional/arduino/hardware/megaavr/1.8.5/libraries/Wire/src/Wire.h:60:13: note: candidate 2: virtual uint8_t TwoWire::requestFrom(uint8_t, size_t)
     uint8_t requestFrom(uint8_t, size_t);

is from a third party library, can be disregarded and -hopefully- is fixed by their maintainers with an update in the future.