ANT Forum

We are pleased to announce that official Linux ANT support is now available for testing in the ANT Linux SDK beta package now available in the thisisant.com downloads section: https://www.thisisant.com/resources/ant-sdk-linux-beta-beta-release-for-customer-testing-and-feedback/

Please recognize that because this library is new and there are so many varieties of Linux that we haven't tested against we are releasing it as a beta release and request your feedback on anything that isn't working. Also note, the included libraries support using libusb based devices including the USB2 and USBm, but not SI based devices like the module dev boards.

We hope providing our official API on Linux helps you with your ANT projects!

Leave any feedback and questions in this thread. Thanks!      

It should work, but hasn't been tested by us yet. Let us know how it goes!      

@hisoft, I am guessing it is failing because it can't find the USB stick. Try using '0' instead of '1', the USB enumeration starts at 0.

It is also possible something else is using the stick or you don't have the drivers installed properly.

Sorry you just get a hard seg fault instead of a useful error, looks like the demo is set up with asserts to flag when the connection doesn't work, but will just try to dereference the null pointer on production.      

You likely need to run with elevated privileges to access the libusb stack in your OS then, try running the demo using sudo.      

Going back to what I said about drivers, I just noticed the package we released is missing the dependencies list. Please make sure the following are installed on your system, according to your OS:

Debian:
-gcc/g++
-make
-libpthread-stubs0-dev
-pkg-config
-libglib2.0-dev
-libgirepository1.0-dev
-gperf
-libudev-dev

RedHat:
-gcc/g++
-make
-libxcb-devel
-pkgconfig
-gobject-introspection-devel
-gperf
-libudev-devel

Mac OSX:
-xcode tools
-clang
-make      

I am not sure I understand what happened on the second one, is it a copy paste error or was there no error printed?      

Here are some instructions for how we got it working on a Raspberry Pi 2 running Raspbian, we will include them in the next release:

Step 1: Packages and commands to install for ANT_LIB




NOTE: After installing the packages, if we run 'pkg-config --libs libusb


', it should print '-lusb' to provide the linker argument to link to the libusb library for the compiler. You should try to use this first for the LINKER_ARGUMENTS (step 2) provided below, if this fails with the compiler complaining about undefined reference to the libusb functions then use '-lusb-1.0' as provided in the example below.


Step 2: Modify DEMO_LIB\makefile

From:
ifeq ($(BUILD_OS), linux)
LINKER_ARGUMENTS = -pthread -L$(ANTLIB_PATH)/gccDebug -Wl,--start-group -lANT_LIB -Wl,--end-group -Wl,-rpath,./ -lrt
To:
ifeq ($(BUILD_OS), linux)
LINKER_ARGUMENTS = -pthread -L$(ANTLIB_PATH)/gccDebug -Wl,--start-group -lANT_LIB -Wl,--end-group -Wl,-rpath,./ -lrt -lusb-1.0

Step 3: Removing unused library from makefile
Since we are installing the libusb libraries in the OS, there is no need to extract and recompile the libudev and libusb tar balls that came with the package again.
In ANT_LIB/makefile, navigate to the lines below and comment them out of the make process:

# Linux libusb
ifeq ($(BUILD_OS), linux)
echo "Unpacking and building libudev & libusb-1.0..."
tar xvjf libraries/libudev/udev_*.* && cd udev* && ./configure && make && cp libudev/.libs/libudev*.o ../gccDebug/libraries && cp libudev/.libs/libudev*.o ../gccRelease/libraries && cd .. && rm -R udev*
tar xvjf libraries/libusb-1.0/libusb-1.0.* && cd libusb-1.0.* && ./configure && make && cp libusb/libusb*.o ../gccDebug/libraries && cp libusb/os/libusb*.o ../gccDebug/libraries && cp libusb/os/libusb*.o ../gccRelease/libraries && mv libusb/libusb*.o ../gccRelease/libraries && cd .. && rm -R libusb-1.0.*

# OSX libusb
else ifeq ($(BUILD_OS), osx)
ifeq ($(FRAMEWORK_TYPE), libusb)
echo "Unpacking and building libusb-1.0..."
tar -zxvf libraries/libusb-1.0/libusb-1.0.* && cd libusb-1.0.* && ./configure && make && cp libusb/libusb*.o ../gccDebug/libraries && cp libusb/os/libusb*.o ../gccDebug/libraries && cp libusb/os/libusb*.o ../gccRelease/libraries && mv libusb/libusb*.o ../gccRelease/libraries && cd .. && rm -R libusb-1.0.*
endif
endif

Step 4: Build the Demo
In DEMO_LIB, type 'make' to start the build process.