librealsense on a Raspberry Pi 4

A step by step instruction for installing librealsense on a Raspberry Pi 4, or more specifically pyrealsense.

Credit goes to datasith, who also made a tutorial about this.

This repository can be understood as a fork from his wiki entry.

Hardware

Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 8GB Rev 1.4 B
64 GB SanDisk SD card
Intel Realsense D435

Operating System

Install Raspberry Pi OS 32-bit installed via the Raspberry Pi Imager.
If you're doing this in headless mode, the Imager program allows you to conviniently set up WiFi and SSH access.

Prerequisites

Start with updating, upgrading, and installing dependencies and tools:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install -y automake libtool cmake libusb-1.0-0-dev libx11-dev xorg-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libssl-dev clang llvm libatlas-base-dev python3-opencv

Expand the filesystem by selecting Advanced Options > Expand Filesystem, and select yes to rebooting:

sudo raspi-config

(not necessary on the 8 GB Raspberry) Increase swap to 2GB by changing the file below to CONF_SWAPSIZE=2048:

sudo nano /etc/dphys-swapfile

(not necessary on the 8 GB Raspberry) Apply the change:

sudo /etc/init.d/dphys-swapfile restart swapon -s

Clone the realsense repo and create a new udev rule:

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/IntelRealSense/librealsense.git
cd librealsense
sudo cp config/99-realsense-libusb.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/

Apply the change (needs to be run by root):

sudo su
udevadm control --reload-rules && udevadm trigger
exit

Add the following lines to the end of your .bashrc file (some of these are first needed at later steps):

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

export PROTOCOL_BUFFERS_PYTHON_IMPLEMENTATION=cpp
export PROTOCOL_BUFFERS_PYTHON_IMPLEMENTATION_VERSION=3

export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/usr/local/lib:/home/pi/librealsense/build/wrappers/python

Apply the change:

source ~/.bashrc

Installation

Install protobuf — Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data:

cd ~
git clone --depth=1 -b v3.10.0 https://github.com/google/protobuf.git
cd protobuf
./autogen.sh
./configure
make -j4
sudo make install
cd python
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=../src/.libs
python3 setup.py build --cpp_implementation 
python3 setup.py test --cpp_implementation
sudo python3 setup.py install --cpp_implementation
sudo ldconfig
protoc --version # libprotoc 3.10.0

(Running the python tests might throw errors, but the installation still worked fine for me in the end.)

Install libtbb-dev parallelism library for C++:

cd ~
wget https://github.com/PINTO0309/TBBonARMv7/raw/master/libtbb-dev_2018U2_armhf.deb
sudo dpkg -i ~/libtbb-dev_2018U2_armhf.deb
sudo ldconfig
rm libtbb-dev_2018U2_armhf.deb

Change default C/C++ compiler to clang (#9962)

export CC=/usr/bin/clang
export CXX=/usr/bin/clang++

Install RealSense SDK librealsense:

cd ~/librealsense
mkdir  build  && cd build
cmake .. -DBUILD_EXAMPLES=true -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DFORCE_LIBUVC=true -DOTHER_LIBS="-latomic"
make -j4
sudo make install

(The DOTHER_LIBS flag might not be required, but I had it from previous attempts to fixing this and it worked so I'm leaving it)

Install RealSense SDK pyrealsense2 Python bindings for librealsense:

cd ~/librealsense/build
cmake .. -DBUILD_PYTHON_BINDINGS=bool:true -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE=$(which python3)
make -j4
sudo make install

Change the default compiler back to gcc

unset CC
unset CXX

Testing

I've included an example script for using the pyrealsense2 library. Tested with a D435.

Download the example python script from this repo

cd ~
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mathklk/realsense_raspberry_pi4/master/example.py
chmod +x example.py

Run the script (requires a desktop environment to show the image)

./example.py

mathklk / realsense_raspberry_pi4