How-to Guide Archives - Embedded Artistry

26 March 201821 April 2020

Seeing Intermittent GitHub Clone Failures on Jenkins? Check Your Repo Size

One of my clients noticed occasional build failures while using Jenkins. It was a strange situation, as their builds would suddenly see a burst of failures with no apparent change. I have been using the same Jenkins setup internally for the past year, and I have never observed such behavior. Their software builds for three …

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22 March 201815 December 2021

Getting Started with the Snapdragon Flight: Driver Development

Earlier this year I was tasked with figuring out how to write a custom device driver for the Snapdragon Flight. While the process ended up being straightforward, documentation and pointers are largely lacking for the Snapdragon Flight environment. What follows is a summary of the information I learned on my driver development journey. I hope …

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22 February 201815 December 2021

Generating GStreamer Pipeline Graphs

I've been working with GStreamer quite a bit recently. I often find it difficult to visualize the pipelines I'm working with, especially for complex pipelines involving multiple video streams. I've been manually creating my own pipeline graphs to keep the details straight. However, maintaining these graphs is time consuming and error-prone. Recently I discovered that …

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19 February 201821 April 2020

Code Cleanup: Splitting Up git Commits In the Middle of a Branch

I tend to follow a fairly traditional git development flow. When I am working on a new feature or a bug fix, I will make a branch and commit changes as I progress. I often just quickly commit incremental changes and make brief notes on my logic for that chunk. I like to clean up …

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25 January 201815 December 2021

Getting Started with Snapdragon Flight: Dev Environment Setup & Useful Resources

I recently started working with Qualcomm's Snapdragon Flight kit. The platform looks pretty interesting, but instructions for getting started are scattered around various locations. I've been compiling the disparate instructions and will be sharing simplified guides for anyone else who's annoyed by the unorganized documentation. First things first: let's walk through the development environment setup. …

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11 January 201815 December 2021

Jenkins: Configuring a Linux Slave Node

Most Jenkins instances start out by using only a single build node. Many teams will quickly outgrow this limit for any number of reasons, such as: Increasing build throughput due to long build times Increasing the number of concurrent builds that can run Building and testing software on multiple architectures (e.g. x86, ARM) Building and …

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8 January 201815 December 2021

Installing ROS on an NVIDIA Tegra TX2

I've recently configured Jenkins slave nodes for a client. One of their build configurations is targeted for a Tegra TX2, so I was configuring a new TX2 build machine to generate ARM images. I was following my usual steps for configuring a Linux slave node, but quickly ran into trouble. Many of the dependencies, particularly …

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28 December 201715 December 2021

Jenkins: Generating Blue Ocean URLs

I just finished setting up a Jenkins build server for a client. This client wanted to use Blue Ocean, the new attractive and streamlined user interface for Jenkins Pipeline projects. Once Blue Ocean is installed, users can switch between the standard Jenkins interface and the Blue Ocean interface at will. However, many users interact with …

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21 December 201721 April 2020

Jenkins: Kick off a CI Build with GitHub Push Notifications

When creating a Jenkins multi-branch pipeline job, builds will be triggered based on the rules set for each job. By default, each repository is scanned on a timer (e.g. every 30min, once a day) and builds are triggered if new commits or pull requests have been made since the last scan. However, what I really …

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16 November 201715 December 2021

Jenkins: Running Steps as sudo

I came across a situation recently where I needed my Jenkins user to be able to run commands as sudo. I have a job that is scheduled nightly to install and update dependencies prior to running my builds. Since apt-get needs to be run with sudo, I needed some way to workaround the password input …

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