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Installation

Right now, the only option for installation is to build from source. This requires Rust to be installed (which is typically done using rustup), along with a C compiler (GCC or Clang on Linux, one of which should already be installed by default) to build with apriltag support.

Quick installation

With all of the prerequisites installed, you can run cargo install --git https://github.com/FRC-4121/VikingVision <bins>, where <bins> is the binary targets to install, passed as separate arguments. For example, to install just the CLI and playground, you’d run cargo install --git https://github.com/FRC-4121/VikingVision vv-cli vv-pg. The available targets are:

  • vv-cli - The command-line interface for the library, which handles loading and running pipelines. It doesn’t have any fancy features, but can run without a desktop environment and only using the minimal resources.
  • vv-gui - Currently a stub that just prints, “Hello, World!”. Development is ongoing, and hopefully it’ll be usable by March 2026.
  • vv-pg - A “playground” environment, made for testing some basic image processing tools. It’s not super fancy, but it aims to at least be an alternative to messing around with OpenCV in Python that uses our libraries instead.

Building from source

If you want more control over the build, or want to more easily maintain an up-to-date nightly version, you can clone the repository with git clone --recursive https://github.com/FRC-4121/VikingVision. The source for the apriltag code is in a Git submodule, so you have to do a recursive clone! From there, you can use Cargo to build and run. It’s strongly recommended that you use release builds for production, they run about ten times faster!

Features

Various parts of this project can be conditionally enabled or disabled. The default features can be disabled by passing the --no-default-features flag to the Cargo commands, and then re-enabled using --features and then a comma-separated list of features. For example, to build on Windows without V4L, you could append --no-default-features --features apriltag,ntable to your commands.

  • apriltag (enabled by default) - Allow detecting AprilTags. This requires a C compiler. See apriltag-sys’s README for more information on how to build.
  • v4l (enabled by default) - Allow video capture through V4L2 APIs. This is the only kind of camera that’s supported, and only works on Linux (V4L stands for “video for Linux”, after all). To build on other systems, this feature must be disabled.
  • ntable (enabled by default) - Enable a NT 4.1 client. This is implemented in Rust, but pulls in a lot of dependencies through its use of async that it makes sense to have it be conditionally enabled.
  • debug-gui - Enable window creation for debugging images. This pulls in winit, which is pretty large dependency for window creation.
  • debug-tools - Right now, only deadlock detection. This severely impacts performance, and is only meant to be enabled for debugging deadlocks in the code.