Welcome to LiDARShooter

To use the convenient devcontainer.json setup for VSCode you'll want to make sure you have Docker or Docker Desktop installed, depending on which OS you're on. Also make sure that the Dev Container extension is installed in your VSCode installation.

Before you open and build the devcontainer do the following. If you're on Windows, you'll need to open .devcontainer/devcontainer.json and make the following changes: Comments out remoteEnv's DISPLAY and XAUTHORITY variables and also comment out the last two source= lines in the mounts section. When you're done with this it should look like this:

{
	"remoteEnv": {
		//"DISPLAY": "${localEnv:DISPLAY}",
		//"XAUTHORITY": "/home/devuser/.Xauthority",
		"QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR": "1"
	},

	// Maps the .ssh/ folder from your ${HOME} into /home/devuser/.ssh
	"mounts": [
		"source=${localEnv:HOME}${localEnv:USERPROFILE}/.ssh,target=/home/devuser/.ssh,type=bind,consistency=cached",
		//"source=/tmp/.X11-unix,target=/tmp/.X11-unix,type=bind",
		//"source=${localEnv:XAUTHORITY},target=/home/devuser/.Xauthority,type=bind"
	]
}

In order to view the Qt application from inside the devcontainer you'll want to have an X11 server installed for Windows. If you have the latest WSL2 installed then you will likely have one already installed and running by default, i.e. Xwayland. You might need to adjust the DISPLAY port either way. I believe :0.0 will work for the Xwayland situation. However, if you don't have the latest WSL2 and can't see Xwayland running on your GPU (if you have an NVIDIA GPU) by running nvidia-smi from a WSL2 terminal, then you'll need to install an X11 server. I prefer MobaXterm for ease of install and the fact that it tells you what address and port its X server is running on when you mouse over the "X" in the upper right corner of the open MobaXterm application. Installing it and setting running export DISPLAY=[the address that MobaXterm says] in the bash terminal inside your running devcontainer on Windows. You can save this DISPLAY setting in your devcontainer.json file in the remoteEnv section so you don't have to set it for any additional terminal you open inside the devcontainer.

The default .devcontainer/devcontainer.json in the main and dev branches should work just fine for Ubuntu or Fedora and related OSes.

For MacOS the default configuration may work but may not.

The XAUTHORITY etc. changes are needed to make it possible to open the Qt application.

To open in the devcontainer with VSCode, run Ctrl+Shift+P and find "Open Folder in Container". Give the top level lidarshooter folder as the folder to open. This will run for a while to build the container. When it's done proceed with the build.

Caveat

If you don't have a .ssh folder inside your home directory (on any OS, Windows, Linux, or MacOS), then you'll also want to comment out the first source= line in the mounts section of .devcontainer/devcontainer.json to look like this:

	"mounts": [
		//"source=${localEnv:HOME}${localEnv:USERPROFILE}/.ssh,target=/home/devuser/.ssh,type=bind,consistency=cached",
	]

Building the Source

Build with the following:

cd ros_ws && catkin_make

The default build will use CPU-only raytracing. If you want to use the NVIDIA OptiX raytracer backend then you'll need to copy the Optix 7.6 SDK unzipped into the root folder, i.e. lidarshooter at the cloned top level. Specifically it should be extracted to show

NVIDIA-OptiX-SDK-7.6.0-linux64-x86_64

where the folder shown above is inside the directory into which you cloned the repository.

Starting Up

In order to start up the main program you'll need to source the ROS setup file after the build.

source ros_ws/devel/setup.bash
roscore &
rosrun lidarshooter LiDARShooterGUI

I've been meaning to add an additional container which just runs roscore so you don't have to remember to start it up, but I haven't gotten around to it.