Documentation for building OpenPlotter images?

[mairas]

Hi,

I (as in Hat Labs) have been planning on starting to sell pre-configured Raspberry Pi computers for a plug-and-play OpenPlotter experience. I would prefer to use OpenPlotter as is but in practice would want to create a new image with a few additions and/or modifications required for the out-of-the-box operation. In particular, I'd need to install the SH-RPi daemon, make a few /boot/firmware/config.txt modifications and possibly add Hat Labs branding to the desktop wallpaper. And probably some other similar things as well.

Is there any documentation for building images yourself? I found the pi-gen repo and the openplotter64 branch which looks like the right thing to poke. Is there any practical advice, though? :-)

[mgrouch]

You can just apply your customizations to any existing image.
CircleCi supports armhf and arm64 natively and it’s very fast for builds.

For how to do that you can take a look at code in
https://github.com/bareboat-necessities/lysmarine_gen

The instructions for customizing images are on that page under
“Steps to create your own BBN Marine OS image”

The starting point is .circleci folder of that GitHub repository.

[mairas]

You can just apply your customizations to any existing image.
CircleCi supports armhf and arm64 natively and it’s very fast for builds.

Thanks, but I was asking specifically about OpenPlotter and pi-gen.

[BlackSea]

hi @mairas

it's not difficult
1. you clone a pi-gen repository of openplotter https://github.com/openplotter/pi-gen ( there are many branches. eg openplotter64 -> OP4, bullseye-arm64 -> OP3)
2. You install required packages. You find info in README
3. It is best to define stage7, for example
4. Create you build.conf file ( env variables you can find in README)
5 If you are ready

Code:

sudo ./build.sh -c yourbuild.conf

Have a lot of fun

P.S. If you would like to bring SH-RPi also to AvNav Headless please contact me via PM

[grassshamrock]

Monitors. OpenPlotter is designed to be used on monitors with a minimum resolution of 800x480 and 7” in size.

[mairas]

hi @mairas

it's not difficult
1. you clone a pi-gen repository of openplotter https://github.com/openplotter/pi-gen ( there are many branches. eg openplotter64 -> OP4, bullseye-arm64 -> OP3)
2. You install required packages. You find info in README
3. It is best to define stage7, for example
[...]

P.S. If you would like to bring SH-RPi also to AvNav Headless please contact me via PM

Thanks! I actually figured that much already when looking at the openplotter64 branch contents. You're right, it's not difficult.  I'll just be using Docker/Podman for building to maintain a consistent build environment (and also for building on a Mac...). That would also allow moving the builds to a CI pipeline.

I wasn't aware of the AvNav images. Cool stuff!

Regarding the SH-RPi daemon, its installer script is messy and not suited for this kind of use. The script not only installs the Python package but also interactively sets up I2C settings, CAN interfaces etc. I'm thinking of publishing the Python package to PyPi and pulling the package from there to the installer. Any other settings should probably be done separately in pi-gen scripts. Does this sound like a sensible plan to you?

[mairas]

Are the configuration files used for building the different OP variants available?

[mairas]

Next question: Why is the wolfram-engine (mathematica) package license acceptance disabled in the openplotter64 branch? Builds failed until I reverted that change.

[Sailoog]

Because we ignore stage5 and wolfram-engine is there

[Sailoog]

We are still working on OpenPlotter v4.x.x and openplotter/pi-gen will still change a lot. Do not release your image to production until OP4 is stable.