FRCSim, Gazebo v7, and GearsBot example

[mrosen]

Glad I'm not the only one who found this challenging. The good news is that I've got it working, I think.

The authoratative instructions for installing FRCSim should be here: https://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s...anually-ubuntu. They are currently out of date but I have it working on LinuxMint18 and am reasonably confident that if you use the updated version of Gazebo v7 and the 2017 version of the simulation plugins you’ll be OK. Specifically:

Their “Install Gazebo” step has you use a version-specific shell-script. Try this instead:
sudo apt install gazebo7

Their “Install WPILib Gazebo Plugins” step points you to an out-of-date archive that is built against Gazebo6. Try this instead:
http://first.wpi.edu/FRC/roborio/mav...n-2017.1.1.zip

Similarly, they have you install the libgazebo6-dev package. Use libgazebog7-dev instead.

[DAlitz]

I thought I'd try installing the new plugins on a current Ubuntu LTS (16.04) system. The plugins compile without errors; but when I try to start Gazebo 7 with the GearsBotDemo.world (with the GearsBot robot) the plugins fail to load because libboost_system.so.1.54.0 isn't available.

libboost-dev is at version 1.58 is the current LTS and 1.54 isn't available through the package manager. 1.54 was last used in Ubuntu 14.04.

I've look a little through the source to see if I can figure out where it's picking up the version number; but haven't spotted anything.

Any ideas how to work around this?

[mrosen]

I also ran into the missing libboost_system_1.54.0.so problem. I entered a ticket against it here: https://github.com/wpilibsuite/allwpilib/issues/452

My work around is to rebuild the plugins (along with the rest of the library):

1. Clone the updated repository from WPI "allwpilib".

2. Make sure Gradle is installed ("sudo apt install gradle")

3. From the "allwpilib" directory, build using Gradle; "./gradlew build -PmakeSim"

4. Copy the newly build plugins from ~/allwpilib/build/install/simulation/plugins (where Gradle just built them) to ~/wpilib/simulation/plugins (where they are referenced from the "frcsim" script that starts Gazebo for us.

I'm able to get example GearsBot simulation model to move in response to the corresponding default "Gearbot" example program. I'm finding it slow and difficult. I would love to hear about other's experiences here.

[Joe Ross]

Originally Posted by mrosen

2. Make sure Gradle is installed ("sudo apt install gradle")

3. From the "allwpilib" directory, build using Gradle; "./gradlew build -PmakeSim"

FYI, wpilib uses the gradle wrapper (gradlew). Thus it isn't necessary to install gradle before running ./gradlew build. The version of gradle that you installed with apt-get isn't being used. See here for more details: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3...lew-and-gradle

[DAlitz]

Thought of that and tried building my own version yesterday. Build failed with the message that it couldn't find the C++ compiler 'arm-frc-linux-gnueabi-g++'

Apparently I hadn't installed FRC Toollchains (http://first.wpi.edu/FRC/roborio/toolchains/) on this computer yet.

This computer's running Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety). Apparently there isn't a Yakkety version of the arm debugger (gdb-arm-frc-linux-gnueabi) yet; but I installed the rest of the frc-toolchain dependencies.

Build succeeded and the GearsBot demo runs at a glacial pace (~4 fps). Just what I've come to expect when using Intel integrated graphics.

Convincing enough that I'll try upgrading the computer with the GeForce 960 to the latest Ubuntu LTS.