Installing the Nao SDK is pretty straight forward. But getting it to work was not an easy task at all. It wasn’t until I found qiBuild that things got a lot easier. I plan to cover a qiBuild install on Windows and Linux later. The reason I need to install qiBuild on Linux is because currently cross compilation is not supported on Windows for the Nao O/S. Which means if you want to actually test any of the code you write on Windows you will need to build it on Linux.
To start off, let’s go over everything you will need to develop on Windows.
My setup is on Windows 7 64bit Service Pack 1.
Prerequisites
- NAOQI C++ SDK 1.12 Windows 32Bit VS2010 Note: This file is the 2010 version and only available to accepted Nao Developers.
- CMake 2.8 http://www.cmake.org/cmake/resources/software.html
- Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Express or Professional edition http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/express
Getting Started
First we are going to install Visual C++ 2010 Express. This should be pretty straightforward for everyone. Nothing special needs to be done here.
Next were are going to install CMake. I grabbed cmake-2.8.0-win32-x86.exe. The only option I changed was to make sure CMake was added to the PATH for all users.
Finally I extracted the naoqi-sdk-1.12-win32-vs2010.zip into a directory of your choice. I use D:\Development\SDKS\. You can see that I extract the folder name as well.
From here, you can add your bin folder from above to your PATH in your environment variables.
That’s it for installing the files. Now in order for you to create and build a sample project you would need to reference your SDK folder. I spent a couple of hours trying to do this and failed. I was including the libs and linking the modules that I was using, but it still didn’t work. Using qiBuild, you are able to build your project and then open it using Visual Studio. It will automatically add your libraries and link them correctly. This will save you a lot of time. I am going to cover that in my next post here.
