Dev Equipment Notes

Oculus Rift

Linux Setup (Arch)

1. Follow the Arch Wiki article on the Rift. We recommend the oculus-rift-sdk package.
2. Enjoy.

Linux Setup (Ubuntu)

1. Find the Arch AUR package for oculus-rift-sdk here.
2. In its Sources section, a tarball for the SDK should be listed. Download that.
3. Extract the downloaded tarball.
4. In the extracted folder, run ConfigureDebian.sh. This will install any packages you need.
5. Follow the README. The make install they mention will put both ovrd, the Oculus demo, and other tools into your path.

Running

Before you try to run the OculusWorldDemo make sure to run ovrd &. Some guides/forum posts may tell you about oculusd, but that is an older form of the daemon which no longer exists.

Beagle Bone

Setup

The BB comes with an on-board Debian installation, which is runnable just by connecting it to a laptop via USB. If a microSD with a BB Debian install is inserted when powering on, it will load from (and write to) the SD. OS images can be found here.

This means that any group with their own SD can do work independently without clobbering other teams' setups.

Usage

Connecting the BB via USB creates an a LAN with the laptop. The BB will always have an IP of 192.168.7.2. Visiting this in your laptop's browser (Chrome or Firefox only) will bring you to a BB support page. An in-browser IDE for the BB can be accessed via 192.168.7.2:3000.

A BB is a Linux machine like the Raspberry Pi, and can be SSH'd into like normal with: ssh [email protected]

Dangers

The BB has buttons near the LEDs, which if pressed during power-up will initiate a flashing process that overwrites the internal memory with whatever is in the inserted microSD. NEVER DO THIS.

Differences with the Raspberry Pi

While both can be used as general purpose Linux machines, the BB is more tailored toward external hardware connection/manipulation. The Pi has more graphical display power, and less pins for external connections.

The initial setup for the BB is also simpler, as it comes preconfigured with an internal Linux (Debian) install.

Writing an OS to a USB/SB

This guide shows clearly how to flash an OS image onto an SD card. The same process applies for USB cards.

Windows users can follow this guide instead.