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Adding a Board to the Registry

Every support claim the book makes about a board (its status, breadth, emulator and run line) is generated from one row of the board-support registry and the board’s own descriptor. A board you add out of tree needs no row: it runs from its descriptor’s [board.run], [board.flash] and [board.console] tables. A board contributed to nano-ros gets a row, so its status appears on Supported Boards.

How to add a new board

  1. Pick the matching RTOS path. Cortex-M3, M4 or M7 with an RTOS: start from the FreeRTOS or Zephyr starter. Cortex-M0+: the bare-metal starter, which is limited (see the Cortex-M0+ caveat on Supported Boards). Cortex-A or RISC-V64: NuttX or Zephyr. Xtensa has no supported path.

  2. Start from an existing board package, or scaffold one. The board packages nano-ros ships cover the QEMU machines and the reference development kits; nros board list names them and nros board info <board> prints one’s resolved descriptor. For a board of your own, scaffold a package outside nano-ros:

    nros board new my-board --platform freertos --out-of-tree ./boards

    It prints the NROS_EXTRA_BOARD_PATH value through which nano-ros finds the package. A real-hardware board needs a thin package that supplies startup code, a linker script and BoardIdle::wfi() (bare-metal), or that wraps the RTOS’s BSP (FreeRTOS, Zephyr). The Custom Board Package page describes its parts, and the STM32F4 out-of-tree worked example is a complete one.

  3. Say how the board runs. The descriptor, nros-board.toml, states it once: [board.run] for a host process or an emulator, [board.flash] and [board.console] for real silicon. nros run and the generated board pages read those tables; nothing else repeats them.

  4. Build and run the talker and listener. Use your platform chapter’s example, and check the pair against a stock ROS 2 peer (for zenoh, RMW_IMPLEMENTATION=rmw_zenoh_cpp).

  5. Contribute it, if you want a status. A board that stays out of tree works without a registry row; it simply has no status on the generated pages. To have nano-ros carry a status for it, open an issue or a pull request on GitHub with the board package and the commands that build, flash and run it. The maintainers add its registry row, and the status word is derived from the evidence the row records.

What a registry row records

A row records where the board’s image runs in the evidence nano-ros holds (nowhere, on the host, in an emulator, or on hardware), how often that run happens (on every merge, daily, weekly, or by hand, with the date of the last manual run), and, for a board that inherits its breadth from its platform family, which family’s evidence it inherits. The status word is generated from those facts and is never typed by hand. Board Support Levels lists the words and what each means.

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