A few weeks earlier, I wrote about my experience with installing WireOS on a Vector robot. WireOS is a stable open source firmware for the Vector robot maintained by active members of the Vector community. In this post, I discuss my experience compiling wire-os to generate a Custom Firmware (CFW). Vector’s firmware can be updated with an OTA file, which you can now build for yourself. Once you learn how to do this, there are immense possibilities on how you can customize your Vector robot.
People who have built firmware before, such as on Arduino and other platforms know that compiling firmware is rewarding but usually painful. There are a lot of code and package dependencies which need to be resolved before a successful compile. Resolving dependencies is hairy and often frustrating till you get it right.
Not so with WireOS. WireOS has a docker based build approach, which means that all the package dependencies are captured in a Dockerfile. So the main challenges I faced were mainly aro…