A tutorial to set up your environment and Download Source Code

Hardware Configurations

Below are the box configuration for Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 8GB RAM:

Processor: Broadcom BCM2711, Quad core Cortex-A72 (ARM v8) 64-bit SoC @ 1.5GHz
RAM Memory: 1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB, or 8 GB LPDDR4-3200 SDRAM
Flash Memory: Minimum 8 to 32GB capacity
Wireless: 2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz IEEE 802.11ac wireless, Bluetooth 5.0, BLE
Ethernet: Gigabit Ethernet
Ports: 2 USB 3.0 ports; 2 USB 2.0 ports
Display: 2 × micro-HDMI ports (up to 4kp60 supported)
Camera: 2-lane MIPI CSI camera port
Operating temperature: 0 – 50 degrees C ambient

RDK > Raspberry Pi build using public user credentials > RPI4_Hardware.png

Build Setup Instructions

Setting up the Host Environment

The OpenEmbedded build system should be able to run on Ubuntu 20.0 distribution/other compatible linux distribution with the following versions for Git, tar, and Python.

Git 2.25.1 or greater
tar 1.30 or greater
Python 3.10.4 or greater
Coreutils(E.g realpath)

Note: You should also have about 50 Gbytes of free disk space for building images.

The essential packages you need for a supported Ubuntu or Debian distribution are shown in the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install gawk wget git-core diffstat unzip texinfo gcc-multilib \
build-essential chrpath socat cpio python python3 python3-pip python3-pexpect \
xz-utils debianutils iputils-ping python3-git python3-jinja2 libegl1-mesa libsdl1.2-dev \
pylint3 xterm bmap-tools

$ sudo apt-get install git cmake autoconf texinfo openjdk-8-jdk openjdk-8-jre \
m4 libtool libtool-bin curl pkg-config lib32z1 doxygen
$ sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib g++-multilib

Configure Git

Upgrade your Git version to 1.8.x or higher

On Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, if you are unable to upgrade your git version using apt-get, then follow the below steps in order to upgrade

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:git-core/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git

Once git is installed, configure your name and email using the below commands

# review your existing configuration
git config --list --show-origin

# configure user name and email address
git config --global user.name "John Doe"
git config --global user.email johndoe@example.com

# configure git cookies. Needed for Gerrit to only contact the LDAP backend once.
git config --global http.cookieFile /tmp/gitcookie.txt
git config --global http.saveCookies true

Configure repo

In order to use Yocto build system, first you need to make sure that repo is properly installed on the machine:

# create a bin directory
mkdir ~/bin
export PATH=~/bin:$PATH

# Download the repo tool and ensure that it is executable
curl http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/git-repo-downloads/repo > ~/bin/repo
chmod a+x ~/bin/repo

Trivia : Repo is a repository management tool that is built on top of Git. Its main purpose is to help manage projects that consist of many Git repositories, it can also be used to manage uploads to the CMF Gerrit instance and automate aspects of the development workflow.

Repo does not replace Git, it simply aids management of projects that contain multiple Git repositories into a single local working directory. Git will still be used for local operation such as commits etc.

Repo manages this for you by means of an XML based Manifest file. The Manifest file defines which repositories the project uses and links to appropriate revisions of each git repository, i.e where the upstream repositories reside and where they should be cloned locally. It is the manifest.xml (or default.xml) that determines which Git repositories and revisions repo will manage. This manifest.xml file is hosted in a Git repository along with all the other git repositories.

Credential configuration

Note: It is also recommended to put credentials in .netrc when interacting with the repo. (Here in login we need to give public user id which created to login code.rdkcentral.com)

For Signup - https://wiki.rdkcentral.com/signup.action

A sample .netrc file is illustrated below

machine code.rdkcentral.com login <YOUR_USERNAME> password <YOUR_PASSWORD>

machine github.com login <YOUR_USERNAME> password <YOUR_PASSWORD>

Downloading Source Code & Building

Downloading Source Code

Following commands fetch the source code using repo tool

$ mkdir <Directory-Name> && cd <Directory-Name>

Please use the following repo init command

repo init -u https://code.rdkcentral.com/r/rdkcmf/manifests -b kirkstone -m rdkv-nosrc.xml

repo sync -j `nproc` --no-clone-bundle --no-tags

Building

MACHINE=raspberrypi4-64-rdk-android-ipstb-oss source meta-cmf-raspberrypi/setup-environment

bitbake lib32-rdk-ipstb-oss-image

The above step configures and sets up your directory to start an appropriate build. And bitbake <image-name> is used to initiate the build

On Successful build, the ROOTFS (in vmdk format) would be available at the following reference location based on the build type :

build-raspberrypi4-64-rdk-android-ipstb-oss/tmp/deploy/images/raspberrypi4-64-rdk-android-ipstb-oss/imagename.wic.bz2

Flashing the RPI Image

The micro SD card should be formatted (FAT) before writing the RPI image to it. The minimum SD card size that can be used is 2GB.
Using dd on linux/macOS:

bzcat <IMAGE_NAME>.wic.bz2 | sudo dd of=/dev/sdb bs=4M iflag=fullblock oflag=direct conv=fsync

Using bmaptool:

bzip2 -d <path to ImageName.wic.bz2>
sudo -E bmaptool copy --nobmap <path to ImageName.wic> <path to SD card space>

Example:
$ bzip2 -d rdk-ipstb-oss-image_rdk-next_20241208053801.rootfs.wic.bz2
$ sudo -E bmaptool copy --nobmap rdk-ipstb-oss-image_rdk-next_20241208053801.rootfs.wic.bz2 /dev/sda

You can also use applications like BalenaEtcher to flash a micro SD card with the RPI image.
References
- RPi4 Serial/UART:
- J8 connector
- PIN6 - GND
- PIN8 - RX
- PIN10 - TX
- Baud: 115200 8N1
- Useful yocto/bitbake commands