euRobotics Forum Windows Setup

Toolchain Installation

Windows users can participate in the first part of the hands-on where Orocos components are created and used. Pay attention that installing the Orocos Toolchain on Win32 platforms may take a full day in case you are not familiar with CMake, compiling Boost or any other dependency of the RTT and OCL.

Requirements:

  • Visual Studio 2005 or 2008
  • CMake 2.6.3 or newer (2.8.x works too)
  • Boost C++ 1.40.0
  • Readline for Windows (see Taskbrowser with readline on Windows)
  • Cygwin installation (default setup is fine)

See the Compiling on Windows with Visual Studio wiki page for instructions. The TAO/Corba part is not required to participate in the workshop.

You need to follow the instructions for RTT/OCL v2.3.1 or newer, which you can download from the Orocos Toolchain page. We recommend to build for Release.

In case you have no time nor the experience to set this up, we provide bootable USB sticks that contain Ubuntu Linux with all workshop files.

Workshop Sources

An additional package is being prepared that will contain the workshop files. See euRobotics Workshop Sources for downloading the sources.

Windows users might also install the Kst program which is a KDE plot program that also runs on Linux. We provided a .kst file for plotting the workshop data. See the Kst download page.

Testing Your Setup

In case you completed building and installing RTT and OCL, you can launch a cygwin or cmd.exe prompt and run the orocreate-pkg script to create a new package, which is in your c:\orocos\bin directory. Make sure that your PATH variable is propertly extended with 
set PATH=%PATH%;c:\orocos\bin;c:\orocos\lib;c:\orocos\lib\orocos\win32;c:\orocos\lib\orocos\win32\plugins
(replace c:\orocos with the actual installation path, which might also be c:\Program Files\orocos)

You repeat the classical CMake steps with this package, generate the Solution file and build and install it. Then start up the deployer with the deployer-win32.exe program and type 'ls'. It should start and show meaningful information. If you see strange characters in the output, you need to turn of the colors with the '.nocolors' command at the Deployer's prompt.