Astra SDK Samples on Ubuntu 16.04 - Blank SFML screen

Technical Support & Q&A
3

Good news everyone! After contacting Orbbec Tech Support I received the following information:

  1. the Astra SDK is not officially supported on Linux yet, and they suggest using the OpenNI2 SDK provided at Develop – Orbbec (this is a special version of OpenNI2 that contains the drivers for orbbec’s cameras. I’m not sure if there are any other differences).

  2. The Astra Mini S (and possibly also the Astra Mini, I didn’t ask about Mini specifically, only the Mini S) is not supported by the Astra SDK yet. A potential workaround is to copy the drivers from the Orbbec provided OpenNI2 SDK (again, from Develop – Orbbec), to the proper folder of the SDK.

I saw multiple posts on the forum that say “I just had to put the drivers in the right folder and it worked!” and never explain exactly what they mean. Here’s what I did to get the Astra SDK working for the Mini S:

  1. Make sure that your /etc/udev/rules.d/55-orbbec-usb.rules file has a line for your USB device. See my first post in this thread (basically just find the camera with lsusb and then make sure there is a line in the udev rules that has the correct vendor and product id for your camera. Restart your computer after changing this.

  2. The updated drivers for the Astra Mini are in the OpenNI2 SDK. Download the Orbbec provided OpenNI2 SDK from the site above, and the drivers are located in ./Redist/OpenNI2/Drivers. According to Orbbec support, the two files you need are liborbbec.so and orbbec.ini (I copied the entire contents of the Drivers folder and it doesn’t seem to have harmed anything). Copy these files to the Astra SDK (I cloned the Github repository and switched to the develop branch) by placing them in ./vendor/openni2/ubuntu-x64/OpenNI2/Drivers. You can then compile as normal from the Astra SDK root directory, and run one of the samples ie:

    $ cd /path/to/your/sdk
    $ mkdir build
    $ cd build
    $ cmake …
    $ make
    $ ./bin/SimpleDepthViewer-SFML

And now the video appears immediately.

Thanks you to @Jackson for the help and suggestions!

2 Likes