OpenCPN on Raspberry PI2

[sparticle]

Bram,

Thanks for this, I am already downloading the image will take a while on my bit of string!

Looks very promising.

Cheers
Spart

[mattkab]

You guys absolutely rock!

Seriously. All of you.

Tonight I got an RPi2 to render vector charts, with USB-based AIS and GPS, and hardware accelerated OpenGL!

If you'll forgive me for posting a link to my blog here, I have the complete recipe posted.

But really, all I did was stand on the shoulders of the giants here.

If you can't tell, I'm quite thrilled by this.

[conachair]

Originally Posted by sparticle

Bram,

Thanks for this, I am already downloading the image will take a while on my bit of string!

Looks very promising.

Cheers
Spart

Another vote for openplotter! Though a pi 3 really makes a big difference. I've just had 3 days offshore with the pi/openplotter behaving very well indeed
Don't think there's *any* all in one boat nav/monitoring software which comes close to this, and it's not even past beta yet. Mqtt has just been added, so you can push any data onto the web or view onboard with a smartphone/tablet etc.

Sent from my SGP511 using Tapatalk

[seandepagnier]

I tried raspberry v2 with 5-27 rasbian image, and enabled experimental opengl driver.


Interestingly opencpn builds without GLES as the headers are not installed (I cannot even install them as raspbian is broken)

So opengl is not using glshim, which should be fine, but this means it doesn't have ETC1 compressed textures as supported by the hardware, and it doesn't support dxt1 compression in opengl either. It would be nice to try with glshim and GLESv1 somehow with the new driver. I'm not sure if the driver even supports compressed textures in hardware or not.

As for issues, I found 2 as already reported:

1) panning broken (workaround: disable accelerated panning in config)
2) program instantly crashes when zooming way out with cm93. This is most likely a driver bug as there is no backtrace available. I will try to determine the opengl commands that caused it.


Otherwise it works pretty well other than the quilting logic being unfortunately slow which should be looked into as this affects everyone but especially arm platforms.

[seandepagnier]

I was able to install libgles1-mesa-dev after apt update. Now opencpn is building with glshim....

[verkerkbr]

Originally Posted by boat_alexandra

I was able to install libgles1-mesa-dev after apt update. Now opencpn is building with glshim....

Sean,

There are two other strange behaviours:

If you open the grib plugin the screen becomes green, yellow etc. This works in relation to the date of the the grib file is progressing. Closing the plug-in, then the screen is back again.

The tidal graph is not shown. But if you move the curser over the pop-up screen the graph slowly appears with a thin line.

Kernel updates are appearing rapidly. Latest version is 4.4.19-V7+ (sudo rpi-update). Looks like, that with every kernel update OpenGL is more stable.

Do not see any upgrades of the VC4 driver.

Otherwise the Raspberry pi2 and pi3 works very well with OpenGL.

The fragmented screen can easily be "repaired" by moving the screen from left to right etc. Wipe the screen clean !

Regards,


Bram

[seandepagnier]

....

It was building with glshim, but when I got back the pi was dead wouldn't boot that sd card. Another card worked. Hmm. Ok I try starting all over on another sd but it takes another day.

I think the sd card was bad because already I had "missing files" including "/etc/apt" which I had to copy from another image to make the system "working"

I am trying with another sd. I think these raspberries suffer from using sd card. I have odroid c2 with emmc, and it's much better. It boots in only 2-3 seconds and compiles opencpn a lot faster.

Originally Posted by verkerkbr

Sean,

There are two other strange behaviours:

If you open the grib plugin the screen becomes green, yellow etc. This works in relation to the date of the the grib file is progressing. Closing the plug-in, then the screen is back again.

Grib plugin worked without flaws for me. Do you have a grib file? May be you have broken config?

The tidal graph is not shown. But if you move the curser over the pop-up screen the graph slowly appears with a thin line.

I think tides worked fine, but I will try again.

Kernel updates are appearing rapidly. Latest version is 4.4.19-V7+ (sudo rpi-update). Looks like, that with every kernel update OpenGL is more stable.

Do not see any upgrades of the VC4 driver.

Otherwise the Raspberry pi2 and pi3 works very well with OpenGL.

I think not really

The fragmented screen can easily be "repaired" by moving the screen from left to right etc. Wipe the screen clean !

Regards,

Or by disabling accelerated panning. This is also a driver bug, I think maybe fbo need to be pot, or, something. I can test it.


I found also now there is an orange pi for $9.99 and it's as good as raspberry 2. They have a bigger orange which is $35 and has everything the raspberry 3 has but faster with 2gb ram and comes with 16gb emmc builtin and supports sata drive... hmm.

[NahanniV]

Originally Posted by boat_alexandra

.....
I found also now there is an orange pi for $9.99 and it's as good as raspberry 2. They have a bigger orange which is $35 and has everything the raspberry 3 has but faster with 2gb ram and comes with 16gb emmc builtin and supports sata drive... hmm.

While I would agree with you that there is probably better/cheaper hardware available, I think the Rpi has such a following that it is the clear choice. It will be supported for a long time after others are forgotten.

As far as improving the driver, I think you can report bugs or other issues directly to the developer on GitHub:

https://github.com/anholt/mesa/issues

I had the same issue of no longer being able to boot after an OpenCPN crash using the experimental driver, perhaps there is an issue there.

Cheers,
JM.

[verkerkbr]

In the past I also had crashes and sometimes the settings of OpenCPN were gone and I had to renew the settings.

But now with the latest kernel version it works much better. If you don't outzoom higher then 20700 or 16900 (0,10) there is almost no problem. I only have to do a bit of "wiping" the screen when changing to a higher zoom factor..

Other software does not seem to have problems. Is it an OpenCPN issue ?

If I try to set the panning to =0. It always come back as =1. ??

The Grib plugin works en gives the right information. Only the screen becomes green and other colours as the time and date progresses and the chart is back again after closing the grib.

[CarCode]

Originally Posted by verkerkbr

Other software does not seem to have problems. Is it an OpenCPN issue ?

Yes and No. OpenCPN sadly uses wxWidgets libraries which tries to "emulate" or better said to be interoperable with almost any operating system. But wxWidgets is not able to do so. Your other software does not use such a wrapper. That is the first reason why OpenCPN often crashes.

Gerhard

[seandepagnier]

Originally Posted by verkerkbr

In the past I also had crashes and sometimes the settings of OpenCPN were gone and I had to renew the settings.

But now with the latest kernel version it works much better. If you don't outzoom higher then 20700 or 16900 (0,10) there is almost no problem. I only have to do a bit of "wiping" the screen when changing to a higher zoom factor..

The bugs are quite possibly in opencpn, or the graphics driver. Since it's opengl related it's probably not in wxwidgets, but any library we are using could create "undefined behavior"


I am trying the vc4 driver with gles... painful.

[verkerkbr]

This is what is shown by zooming out:

At first the grid is zooming out. The Ais objects and own vessel are no longer on the correct location. The chart stays unchanged.

If I then move the screen the reduced area is shown in fragments. Old and in the new scale.

Then after "wiping" the screen right left the image is back in the required zoom factor and the objects are again on the right location.

When this is done the chart image stays in the right reduced format.

But don't go higher then around 18200 (0,10), with a higher value the screen can no longer recovered by wiping the screen.

The Chart format is ENC in a high resolution.

Kap files can zoomed in and out without these problems. But after doing a lot of zooming -in -out OpenCPN locks up and the system needs a reboot.

[seandepagnier]

I think running in gles mode is not working with the vc4 driver. Some operations are implemented in software giving much worse performance, the raspberry becomes unusable.


Eventually the computer starts having issues from "missing" files on the filesystem, and so I tried rebooting.

Now also my second sd card is not booting. So twice now after using the open driver my filesystem gets corrupted in a matter of minutes.

Is it possibly the video drivers causing undefined behavior which corrupts the image?

[NahanniV]

Originally Posted by boat_alexandra

I think running in gles mode is not working with the vc4 driver. Some operations are implemented in software giving much worse performance, the raspberry becomes unusable.


Eventually the computer starts having issues from "missing" files on the filesystem, and so I tried rebooting.

Now also my second sd card is not booting. So twice now after using the open driver my filesystem gets corrupted in a matter of minutes.

Is it possibly the video drivers causing undefined behavior which corrupts the image?

I had the same problem. Tried it several times.
I am planning to try with a different SD card when I am in a place where I can buy one.

[verkerkbr]

Originally Posted by NahanniV

I had the same problem. Tried it several times.
I am planning to try with a different SD card when I am in a place where I can buy one.

It is perhaps an "open door" but did you enlarge the file system after starting the image for the first time ? It is in the menu. It is a bit hidden.