Working Driver Station for Linux

[AustinSchuh]

Originally Posted by demosthenes2k8

Despite having avahi installed on my Linux (fedora) box for years, I can't seem to find the roborio. Was there any custom setup you had to do to get that working?

Nothing special that I recall... apt-get install avahi-daemon on Debian Jessie. You might need to install resolvconf as well. How avahi actually transfers addresses from the daemon to the standard name lookup stack is still a bit of a mystery to me. I haven't spent the time to truly trace down the call chain to figure out how it plugs into the standard resolvconf setup on Linux.

Originally Posted by Joe Ross

You can type the ip address into the team number field.

Thanks! I'll have to try it again some time.


LabView can target Linux. I wonder how hard it would be to re-compile for Linux or OSX.

[fovea1959]

Originally Posted by AustinSchuh

Nothing special that I recall... apt-get install avahi-daemon on Debian Jessie. You might need to install resolvconf as well. How avahi actually transfers addresses from the daemon to the standard name lookup stack is still a bit of a mystery to me. I haven't spent the time to truly trace down the call chain to figure out how it plugs into the standard resolvconf setup on Linux.

The resolver sources are configured in with nsswitch.conf, which configures the resolver routines in libc. The man page for nsswitch.conf says that a source needs to provide a /lib/libnss_SERVICE.so.X to provide service. My desktop box seems to have them in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu, and I see ones for mdns, mdns4, mdns6 among others.

nss is a nice extensible system.

[viggy96]

Originally Posted by lopsided98

I can verify that QDriverStation works on Linux. You will need to compile it yourself though (it isn't very hard), and make sure you use the latest commit (rather than the v0.1-alpha release).

If you happen to use Arch Linux, I created an AUR package for it.

Does it connect via mDNS?

[spat]

Originally Posted by viggy96

Does it connect via mDNS?

The latest version of the QDriverStation does the following to get mDNS working:

• It uses the operating system's functions to obtain the robot IP from a mDNS address.
• Implements a built-in mDNS responder class, which works most of the times (at least with our team's robot). However, the built-in mDNS is very, very basic.

TLDR; mDNS should work even if you don't have a package that supports it.

[demosthenes2k8]

Originally Posted by spat

The latest version of the QDriverStation does the following to get mDNS working:

• It uses the operating system's functions to obtain the robot IP from a mDNS address.
• Implements a built-in mDNS responder class, which works most of the times (at least with our team's robot). However, the built-in mDNS is very, very basic.

TLDR; mDNS should work even if you don't have a package that supports it.

I ended up getting regular mDNS working - after some fidgeting with settings, I set my ethernet adapter connection to Link-Local. After that I have to run avahi-discover every time I connect the cable, but I can work with the robot now.

I've been trying out QDriverStation, and getting an interesting issue saying that the roboRIO is responding to ping, but not the protocol...Time to debug why.