ahmedsabie/minotaur-cpp

C++ implementation of minotaur - UWNRG controls program

Minotaur C++ Reimplementation

master	develop

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Setup
  • Ubuntu
  • Mac
  • Other systems
  • Cygwin
• Contributing
• License

Introduction

Minotaur is the controls software for our microrobots. It is being actively developed with the following goals in mind:

• Cross-platform development and deployment
• Maintainable object-oriented design and architecture
• Abstracted implementation and approachable interface
• High-speed architecture for real-time data crunching (read image recognition)
• Expose controller API that listens to Python scripts for quick navigation deployment

Please checkout the Projects tab for information about roadmap and current progress.

Setup

Ubuntu

apt-get update -qq
apt-get install qt4-dev-tools
cd path/to/repository
mkdir build
cd build
qmake -o makefile ../minotaur.pro
make

Mac

For Mac the easiest way to get up and running is to download and install the Qt Framework. You can also get Qt Creator in order to build the code with one button and use their form editor for easy GUI design. You can open the project by specifying the root directory and then build and run the code from there. To build the code, run the following commands in the root directory:

mkdir build
cd build
qmake -spec macx-g++ ../minotaur.pro
make

The application will be in /builds/ and named minotaur.app. Run it from the Finder since Mac treats applications like directories.

Other systems

If you are running a different linux distro, consult your package manager to see what package you need to install to get the Qt development tools. For Windows (and Mac), the easiest way to get up and running is to download and install the Qt Framework. You can also get Qt Creator in order to build the code with one button and use their form editor for easy GUI design, but make sure to install Qt 5.8 or newer in order to compile and run using Qt Creator. You can open the project by specifying the root directory and then build and run the code from there.

Visual Studio: If you want to develop on Visual Studio and don't already have Qt setup there, (for VS 2013 and older) download the Qt Visual Studio Add-in from here. If you are using Visual Studio 2015 or above, you need to download this package instead. Then restart Visual Studio, click on the Qt menu, go to options and add your Qt versions.

Once you have Qt setup, go to QT5->Open Qt Project File (.pro) and open minotaur.pro from this repository and you are all set!

Cygwin

Make sure you have the following packages installed:

• xorg-server
• xinit
• mingw64-x86_64-qt4-qmake-4.x (for Win64) or mingw64-i686-qt4-qmake-4.x (for Win32)

Getting the GUI working is a little tricky if you never used a window server off cygwin before. However, it's just a few commands that you have to run to get it up and running. You can run almost the same commands as required by the Mac build from the root directory, the exception being qmake4 instad of qmake:

mkdir build
cd build
qmake4 -o makefile ../minotaur.pro
make

When running minotaur.exe, however, you need to first launch an X11 window server. Simply run the xinit command and you should be greeted by a big window with a small terminal in it. How window server works is beyond the scope of this document, you can read up on it if you are interesting. Anyways, once in the new terminal, you can run ./minotaur.exe to launch the program.

Contributing

Please refer to the Contributing Guidelines.

License

Minotaur, Copyright (C) 2016 University of Waterloo Nano-Robotics Group

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or(at your
option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

See the GNU General Public License for more details.