OTA Connect Developer Guide

Upload a sample software version

Every time you bitbake a new image, it is automatically pushed to HERE OTA Connect. You can then send the updated image out to any of your devices. In this guide, you learn a few ways to push updated system images from your build machine or workstation to OTA Connect.

Add a new package from an existing recipe

The simplest update you can do is just adding an extra package to your image, choosing from packages that there are already recipes for. You can see a list of all the packages available with the bitbake-layers show-recipes command.

Example task: Install vim

Because you probably noticed it was missing the first time you went to edit a config file on your device, let’s install vim. Add this line to your local.conf:

IMAGE_INSTALL_append = " vim " (1) (2)
1 Note the spaces before and after the package name. The IMAGE_INSTALL_append option naively appends a string to the list of packages to install, so we wrap it in spaces to make sure we don’t alter the list in unexpected ways.
2 If you already added vim, try adding man or gdb.

Now rebuild your image with bitbake [image-name], where [image-name] is the same as the one you built in the quickstart guide, and push it to your device using OTA Connect. Once you reboot, vim will be available.

Add a new layer someone else created

Since Yocto layers are just recipes for how to build software from source, it’s often quite easy to find a layer for the thing you’re looking for. To add a layer to a Yocto build, you just need to download it, normally by cloning its git repo, and then add it to your bblayers.conf. This will make all of the recipes in the layer available to bitbake.

To demonstrate this, we’re going to try a two-step task. First, we’re going to install pianobar, a command-line client for Pandora. Then, once we’ve got that working, we’re going to add Patiobar, a Node.js-based web front end for pianobar to turn your device into a web-controlled jukebox.

Example task part 1: Install pianobar

Pandora doesn’t work with IP addresses outside of the United States, so if your IP address is not US-American, it won’t work by default. There is a control-proxy configuration option in pianobar though; see the manpage for details.

We’ve created a simple layer called meta-jukebox to use in this guide. It has one layer dependency: meta-nodejs. First, clone those two layers into your project directory:

git clone https://github.com/advancedtelematic/meta-jukebox
git clone https://github.com/imyller/meta-nodejs

Then, add them to your bblayers.conf. Add these lines to build/conf/bblayers.conf:

BBLAYERS += "${METADIR}/meta-jukebox"
BBLAYERS += "${METADIR}/meta-nodejs"

Next, add the following two lines to your local.conf:

IMAGE_INSTALL_append = " pianobar " (1)
LICENSE_FLAGS_WHITELIST += " commercial " (2)
1 This tells bitbake to include the pianobar package in the built image. Note the spaces before and after the package name. The IMAGE_INSTALL_append option naively appends a string to the list of packages to install, so we wrap it in spaces to make sure we don’t alter the list in unexpected ways.
2 Pianobar has a dependency that doesn’t have a fully open source license: it uses ffmpeg for mp3 decoding. By default, Yocto won’t allow that. You need to explicitly permit it by whitelisting commercial licenses.

Now rebuild your image with bitbake [image-name], where [image-name] is the same as the one you built in the quickstart guide. Once you push the updated image to your device with OTA Connect and reboot, you can type pianobar to start playing Pandora radio.

Example task part 2: Install Patiobar (web front end)

Okay, so you got pianobar running. But maybe you don’t want to have to ssh into your device when you want to change channels or songs. Let’s install Patiobar so we can control it using a web interface.

Patiobar is also included in meta-jukebox. To build, just add patiobar to IMAGE_INSTALL_append in your local.conf.

If you are building for 32-bit ARM (i.e. Raspberry Pi), you’ll need some supporting packages. On Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install g++-multilib libssl-dev:i386 libcrypto++-dev:i386 zlib1g-dev:i386

For more details, see the meta-nodejs README.

The Patiobar recipe also includes a systemd service that will create a pianobar config based on options you set in your local.conf, and then starts both Patiobar and Pianobar in screen sessions. You can add these three lines if you wish:

PANDORA_USER=email@example.com (1)
PANDORA_PASSWORD=password (2)
PANDORA_PROXY=myproxy.example.com:3128 (3)
1 Your existing Pandora account name
2 Pandora password
3 An HTTP proxy server to use for Pandora API calls. You can leave it blank to use no proxy, or set it to 'auto' to automatically search for and select a US proxy on startup.

Now, rebuild your image and push it to your device.

After a reboot, Patiobar should launch automatically. Point your web browser to port 3000 on the device, and start listening!

The screen sessions will be named pianobar and patiobar respectively; use screen -r to attach and see what’s going on. You can restart the service with systemctl restart patiobar.

Make your own recipe or layer

A complete guide to writing Yocto recipes is out of scope here, but the Yocto Reference Manual is a great resource. You can also take a look at the recipes in meta-jukebox to use as examples: they’re all fairly simple, and there are examples of four different types of recipe:

  • Pianobar itself is a fully manual recipe, though it’s a pretty simple one; it has specific instructions for the compile and install steps, though they’re essentially just make and make install with a couple of config options.

  • libao and faad2 make use of Autotools to build. They include the line inherit autotools in the recipe, which automatically generates configure, compile, and install instructions based on Autotools.

  • BeautifulSoup is a Python project, with support for setuptools. Yocto supports setuptools out of the box, so python recipes are often just a few lines long: a source URI, license information, and inherit setuptools.

  • Patiobar is a Node.js project, and includes a systemd service, so it inherits two recipe helpers: npm-install and systemd. (npm-install is provided by the meta-nodejs layer.) It also has files that it installs directly from the recipe directory (i.e., not from the source repo), and uses a custom install script.