Attempts at Installing on Windows

[tlian7]

I spent a good amount of time the last day or so unsuccessfully trying to install RTB4 on a Windows machine and wanted to share and log my experience.

Installing Docker went smoothly. The only unique thing you may need to do is enable virtualization on the BIOS settings for your machine. On an ASUS motherboard, it was under Advanced Settings → CPU Configuration.

After cloning all the repositories, the next step was to install Assimp and compile mexximp. This turned out to be the unsolvable roadblock for me.

To compile mexximp, we have to 1) compile Assimp on Windows and 2) Install a C++ compiler for MATLAB and 3) link the compiled library when running mex.

I was able to complete step (1) by cloning the repo, running cmake, and then building it in Visual Studio. Step (2) was very straightforward, as long as you follow the MATLAB instructions. However step (3) seemed to be the major issue. No matter how I tried to link the library and include files, it could not seem to link properly to Assimp and would complain about not being able to find any of the Assimp classes.

I eventually gave up on this, and I now run RTB4 on OSX and then send the docker run commands over to the Windows machine to run, which I suppose is similar to what we do with cloud computing.

I think if we want to get this to work on Windows, we may need to dockerize Mexximp/Assimp, if that is even possible...