DonkeyCar for Jetson Nano-Setup Jetson Nano

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Guides of DonkeyCar

Step 1. Install libraries

Please make sure that you have install image and it could start normally. Open terminal and install libraries as below

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install build-essential python3 python3-dev python3-pip python3-pandas python3-opencv python3-h5py libhdf5-serial-dev hdf5-tools nano ntp

Step 2. Setup virtual environment

sudo pip3 install virtualenv
python3 -m virtualenv -p python3 env
echo "source env/bin/activate" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Step3. Install OpenCV

The first step of Insalling Opencv is to define the Swap-space
Jetson Nano has only 4GB RAM, it is not engough for building Opencv. To avoid from memory crashing, we should define swap-space for Jetson Nano

# Turn off swap
sudo swapoff /var/swapfile
# Allocates 4G of additional swap space at /var/swapfile
sudo fallocate -l 4G /var/swapfile
# Permissions
sudo chmod 600 /var/swapfile
# Make swap space
sudo mkswap /var/swapfile
# Turn on swap
sudo swapon /var/swapfile
# Automount swap space on reboot
sudo bash -c 'echo "/var/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0" >> /etc/fstab'
# Reboot
sudo reboot

Install libraries for OpenCV

# Update
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
# Pre-requisites
sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake unzip pkg-config
sudo apt-get install libjpeg-dev libpng-dev libtiff-dev
sudo apt-get install libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev libv4l-dev
sudo apt-get install libxvidcore-dev libx264-dev
sudo apt-get install libgtk-3-dev
sudo apt-get install libatlas-base-dev gfortran
sudo apt-get install python3-dev

Download source codes of OpenCV

# Create a directory for opencv
mkdir -p projects/cv2
cd projects/cv2
 
# Download sources
wget -O opencv.zip https://github.com/opencv/opencv/archive/4.1.0.zip
wget -O opencv_contrib.zip https://github.com/opencv/opencv_contrib/archive/4.1.0.zip
 
# Unzip
unzip opencv.zip
unzip opencv_contrib.zip
 
# Rename
mv opencv-4.1.0 opencv
mv opencv_contrib-4.1.0 opencv_contrib

Enter the virtual environment env

source ~/env/bin/activate
# Install Numpy
pip install numpy

Configure Cmake

# Create a build directory
cd projects/cv2/opencv
mkdir build
cd build
 
# Setup CMake
cmake -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RELEASE \
    -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local \
    -D INSTALL_PYTHON_EXAMPLES=ON \
    -D INSTALL_C_EXAMPLES=OFF \
    -D OPENCV_ENABLE_NONFREE=ON \
    # Contrib path
    -D OPENCV_EXTRA_MODULES_PATH=~/projects/cv2/opencv_contrib/modules \
    # Your virtual environment's Python executable
    # You need to specify the result of echo $(which python)
    -D PYTHON_EXECUTABLE=~/env/bin/python \
    -D BUILD_EXAMPLES=ON ../opencv

Comple the OpenCV by the following commands
Note that if you didn't setup the swap-space, the compilation process may fail because of memory crash.

make -j2

Install Opencv

# Install OpenCV
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

Link the OpenCV libraries to the virtual environment virtualenv

# Go to the folder where OpenCV's native library is built
cd /usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/cv2/python-3.6
# Rename
mv cv2.cpython-36m-xxx-linux-gnu.so cv2.so
# Go to your virtual environments site-packages folder
cd ~/env/lib/python3.6/site-packages/
# Symlink the native library
ln -s /usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/cv2/python-3.6/cv2.so cv2.so

Run the following command and you will get information as below:

ls -la

total 48
drwxr-xr-x 10 user user 4096 Jun 16 13:03 .
drwxr-xr-x  5 user user 4096 Jun 16 07:46 ..
lrwxrwxrwx  1 user user   60 Jun 16 13:03 cv2.so -> /usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/cv2/python-3.6/cv2.so
-rw-r--r--  1 user user  126 Jun 16 07:46 easy_install.py
drwxr-xr-x  5 user user 4096 Jun 16 07:47 pip
drwxr-xr-x  2 user user 4096 Jun 16 07:47 pip-19.1.1.dist-info
drwxr-xr-x  5 user user 4096 Jun 16 07:46 pkg_resources
drwxr-xr-x  2 user user 4096 Jun 16 07:46 __pycache__
drwxr-xr-x  6 user user 4096 Jun 16 07:46 setuptools
drwxr-xr-x  2 user user 4096 Jun 16 07:46 setuptools-41.0.1.dist-info
drwxr-xr-x  4 user user 4096 Jun 16 07:47 wheel
drwxr-xr-x  2 user user 4096 Jun 16 07:47 wheel-0.33.4.dist-info

Run python, and test the OpenCv

import cv2
 
# Should print 4.1.0
print(cv2.__version__)

(env) [email protected]:~$ python 
Python 3.6.8 (default, Jan 14 2019, 11:02:34) 
[GCC 8.0.1 20180414 (experimental) [trunk revision 259383]] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import cv2
>>> print(cv2.__version__)
4.1.0
>>> quit()

Step 4. Install DonkeyCar Python codes

Clone donkeycar codes from Github

cd ~/projects
https://github.com/waveshare/donkeycar
cd donkeycar
git checkout master
pip install -e .[nano]
pip install --extra-index-url https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/redist/jp/v42 tensorflow-gpu==1.13.1+nv19.3

Step 5. Create DonkeyCar

Create donkeycar example

donkey createcar --path ~/mycar

After runing, files will be generated and saved in the directly ~/mycar

Open he myconfig.py file and modify the camera parameters.

nano myconfig.py

The camera we use is based on Sony IMX219, so we need to change it to CSIC and set the resolution to 224*224

#CAMERA
CAMERA_TYPE = "CSIC"   # (PICAM|WEBCAM|CVCAM|CSIC|V4L|MOCK)
IMAGE_W = 224
IMAGE_H = 224

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