OLA on Beaglebone

This describes how to get OLA working on a Beaglebone from strach. At the time of writing, an "image" does not exist for the beagle bone. This process is based on using the debian os. There certainly are other ways of bulding this, but this is a method that works for me.

Preparing your debian based Beaglebone

Get Robert C nelsons Netinstall scripts,

https://github.com/RobertCNelson/netinstall

cd /netinstall ./mk_mmc.sh --uboot bone --mmc /dev/sdX ( sdX ) is the card

this will build the boot loader onto the card. This is also based on debian Squeeze.

Once its done, put the card in your beagle, and start up. You'll need to connect the Beaglebone via USB, and talk to it via Screen. Follow the instructions for the debian install.. Select SSH server and System Ultiities for your build. It can take a while to finish a build, depending on how fast your internet connections are.

Install dependencies

You need a couple of libraries installed for everything to work correctly. Some of these are available as packages in distros but others need to be downloaded and built manually.

First you'll need at least the following:

• cppunit
• uuid or ossp uuid
• pkg-config
• curses
• lex (or flex)
• yacc (or bison)
• the protocol buffers library http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/ (version 2.3.0 or later)
• microhttpd ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/libmicrohttpd/ (if you want the web UI). You need version >= 0.4.0 of microhttpd

If you're building from git you'll also need the following:

• libtool
• automake
• autoconf

sudo apt-get install libcppunit-dev libcppunit-1.12-1 uuid-dev pkg-config libncurses5-dev libtool autoconf automake  g++ libmicrohttpd-dev libmicrohttpd5 protobuf-c-compiler libprotobuf-lite6 python-protobuf libprotobuf-dev zlib1g-dev bison flex make libftdi-dev  libftdi1 libusb-1.0-0-dev liblo-dev git

Note, these dependancys are slightly different from the Debian build

Tarball

Download the most recent tarball from http://code.google.com/p/open-lighting/downloads/list Extract using

 tar -zxf ola-0.X.Y.tar.gz
 cd ola-0.X.Y

Git

If you don't have git yet, you'll need to install it with your distro's package manager. On Debian / Ubuntu run:

 sudo apt-get install git

Check out the git repo with the following command:

 git clone https://code.google.com/p/open-lighting/ ola
 cd ola

Run autoreconf

If this is the first time run with -i to install the missing files

autoreconf -i

Do the usual build steps

You can pass additional options to ./configure . Run

 ./configure --help

to see all options. The most popular option is --enable-python-libs to build the Python Client Module. If you want to use the RDM responder tests add --enable-rdm-tests.

Once you've decided on the options, it's time to build OLA. If you have a multi-core machine, you can speed up the build by using make -j N. A good value of N is the number of cores on your machine. On a MacBook Pro (4 core) using -j 4 reduced the build time from 5 minutes to 2.5 minutes.

./configure --enable-rdm-tests
make
make check
sudo make install

Finally run ldconfig so you can use the new libraries.

 sudo ldconfig

Device drivers

Note that, for some devices, it is necessary to install drivers for OLA to work with them. For example, the Open DMX USB device needs an additional kernel module that could be built using the instuctions on LLA_and_Q_Light_Controller_Ubuntu_Tutorial. For other devices, refer to the corresponding device page on this wiki.