Description

Docker container enabling the raspberry pi camera in ros-noetic.

Note:

The system is designed to run in headless mode. In the Dockerfile, we compile libcamera from source. Thus, if a GUI is needed one needs to modify the build instructions in the dockerfile and set the DISPLAY variable in the docker-compose.yaml

The setup was successfully tested on a raspberry pi 5 with bookworm as host system and camera-module v1.

Setup guide

Host Setup:

After flashing the rasperian OS, enable the camera usage using

sudo raspi-config

and enable the camera unter interfacing options.

(However, on bookworm there was no such setting and the camera was enabled by default.)

Install docker on the pi:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
for pkg in docker.io docker-doc docker-compose podman-docker containerd runc; do sudo apt-get remove $pkg; done

# Add Docker's official GPG key:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl
sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings
sudo curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/debian/gpg -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc
sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc

# Add the repository to Apt sources:
VERSION_CODENAME=bookworm
echo \
  "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc] https://download.docker.com/linux/debian \
  $(. /etc/os-release && echo "$VERSION_CODENAME") stable" | \
  sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install -y docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin

sudo groupadd docker
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

Logout and login. To verify the docker installation run

docker run hello-world

Container Setup:

Note: The container builds an image for ros-noetic-base, which allows us to connect basic sensors to noetic. If you want to use rviz and simulators on the pi, you should get the desktop image instead.

In the repository run

docker compose build # to build the container
docker compose up -d # to start the container
docker compose exec -it ros-noetic bash # to run an interactive terminal session in the container
docker compose stop # to stop the container

Note:

I usually wrap up the above commands using aliases or using the docker compose plugin in zsh

For example, you might want to add this alias to your bashrc/zshrc

sudo echo "alias dcexec=\"docker exec -it ros-noetic bash\"" >> ~/.bashrc

To interfer with the camera we use this library which we install at Dockerfile-Level.

A python example with this image is comming soon.