Connecting OpenCV and Node.js inside Cloud9 IDE
Vacation time is over, and now i’m on my way from Tartu, Estonia where i participated in 48 km. inline speedskating marathon to Odessa. My bus have Wi-Fi onboard, so i decided to write a short success-story how i managed to build a C++ addon module for Node.js and run it on the real server inside the Cloud9 IDE. You may also want to check the first tutorial since this guid relies on it. The detailed step-by-step guide will be written in the next few days, but here is a key steps:
Prerequisites
- Cloud9 account
- Node.js
- Express framework
- CMake
- OpenCV
Building OpenCV
I built OpenCV manually. This is necessary since i had to configure OpenCV to fit the server configuration:
- Used static build instead of shared one
- Disable all tests, samples and apps
- Disable use of precompiled headers
- Disable GPU and CUDA modules
Disk space limit
You have only 1G of disk quota. When i ran OpenCV build for the first time it exit on 80% with “out of space” message. So it’s better to disable all unused modules. Don’t clone OpenCV repository. Download opencv archive instead! This will require small experience with shell, but nothing complicated:
Demonstration
A minimal Node.js demo that does nothing expect printing OpenCV build information can be seen here: OpenCV Cloud9 demo. It’s ok to see “No app running” message from time to time. As i understood Cloud9 shuts down the apps if they are not used for some period. Tweet me if you have interesting suggestions for the demonstration samples.