This is a brief summary of the work that has been done previously, including the ubuntu 11.04 install, Xtion depth camera setting, openCV 2.3.1 installing, and the final openNI install and configure.
Because this is an overview of the past work, the source codes are not included here.
Ubuntu 11.04 on pandaboard
The installation of Ubuntu 11.04 in the pandaboard did spend me some time. Since there was no hard drive in the pandaboard the SD card was specified to play that role. This means the whole Ubuntu 11.04 system should be written to the SD card. Especially, the becaue the pandaboard was based on ARM cup, it needed a special version of ubuntu – a pre-install ubuntu version for OMAP4. Downloading the system image, then the system install stared.
The hard part I met was not in the downloading, but the image system writing. Since the image was formated in RAW image, normal image burning software e.g. nero was not able to burn such image. Although the official instruction in ubuntu provided the instructions of burning the system image within three different systems windows, linux, and mac.
The instruction of windows system was not working. A disk writer software called ‘disimagewriter’ did not work functionally, at least in my and my coleagues’ computers. And currently, there was no other software that could do the same thing. I had a macbook but unfortunately the official instructions were not lucky to me.
Finally I found a shortcut. I downloaded a software to mount the RAW image as a system drive, and then used another software to copy the whole disk drive to another. In other words, I copied the RAW image -based drive to the SD card drive. It turned out successfully. The details can be reached here.
After an installation the ubuntu now was running on the pandaboard – feels pretty good, but the wifi signal sucked.
Webcams and the Xtion depth camera
Install openCV 2.3.1 in Ubuntu 11.04 with pandaboard
Ubuntu systems have good supports for webcams, but most of these are based on normal x86/x64 systems, not for ARM systems. I was worried about this problem, as the cameras to use with the system were quite special – not only the rgb webcams, but also the depth camera from ASUS Xtion pro camera.
A good way to use the cameras and to get proper drivers is to install some universal drivers, such as v4l, and ffmpeg.
During the install of openCV in the system, these libraries were particularly important.
Install openNI, NITE and depth camera driver for natural interaction app development
Install openNI for ARM-linux was quite easy, as there were three key components ready to download in the openni.org .
Downloading the unstable versions – openNI binary for ARM, sensor openNI for ARM, unzipping the packages and using the sudo ./install.sh’ command to complete the install.
* be aware of that, there is currently no openNI middleware package for ARM -based linux system, which means, some of the advanced features of openNI such like ‘user generators’ and ‘skeleton generators’ could not be used. The middleware for linux x86 was tested, but with no luck. The error’ one or more of the following nodes could not be enumerated‘ was actually caused by that factor.
Anyway, I ve got rgb and depth images to use. Hopefully the middleware for arm-linux comes out sooner.
The summary
It is hard to describe all details in a short post. As posted in the previous articles, the lessens learnt from the whole procedures are valuable, and more important, I wish these would be shared to give guidances to other people’s work.