roborio-docker

This repository contains scripts that are useful for transforming a RoboRIO firmware image into a docker image that can be ran on an ARM computer (it will not work on a normal PC).

This process has been tested on an ODROID-C2 (Ubuntu 16.04) with Docker 1.13.1 installed. However, any Linux OS on a compatible ARM processor that runs docker should work.

This docker image most likely cannot be used to run an unmodified FIRST robot program on it, because WPILib requires access to the NI FPGA present on the RoboRIO.

Build image from firmware image

First, grab the image zipfile from your driver station, and copy it to the machine that you're running docker on. Then, run:

./build_images.sh FRC_roboRIO_x_x.zip

This should create a docker image called 'roborio:x_x', and it will also tag the image as roborio:latest.

Additionally, it will build an image 'roborio-build:latest' which will be a roborio image that contains various essential build tools if you need to build various pieces of software.

Running an SSH build server

The 'start_buildserver.sh' script can be used to start a docker image that can be used in conjunction with the build scripts in roborio-packages. It spawns an SSH server that listens on port 2222. Some magic is done to:

• Switch the processor into 32-bit mode via setarch
• Use LD_PRELOAD to install a uname hook that reports the host being 'armv7l'

To ssh into this docker image, you'll want to add something like this to your ~/.ssh/config

Host roborio-docker
  User root
  Hostname xx.xx.xx.xx
  Port 2222

Why does this exist?

For historical reasons, the roborio-packages repository primarily relies on compiling packages on the RoboRIO. For awhile I was using the roborio-vm to build packages, but it takes a very long time to build complex packages such as NumPy or SciPy. Building on real ARM hardware is a lot faster.