Getting Started

selfdrive is a rather complicated repo.

If you've never worked on a project of this scale, it can be daunting to know where to start. The goal of this guide is to give you enough of a foothold to start asking the right questions and to begin your adventure here at Autonomy Lab.

Fundamentals

Before we even get to cloning selfdrive, you need to have the basic mechanical skills required to traverse a shell. MIT's Missing Semester serves as a great starting point for just this. The following table lists the lectures you should watch if you plan to work on a specific Autonomy Lab group:

Note: an * denotes you should also do the associated exercises.

At a minimum, to clone selfdrive, you should watch and do the exercises for Course overview + the shell and Version Control (Git), as these lectures provide you the fundamentals to hit the ground running.

System Configuration

Since selfdrive consists of software written in different programming languages with a wide variety of dependencies, we've made an effort to make getting your machine ready as painless as possible with the Nix package manager and direnv. You can find cloning instructions and system setup information on the repo's README.md.

Repo Layout

Currently, selfdrive does not respect this structure. We're in the process of migrating over to this layout. Sorry for the time being.

selfdrive/
+-- can/
|   +-- network.yml
|
+-- docs/
|
+-- components/
|   +-- component/
|   |   +-- docs/
|   |   +-- src/
|   |   +-- component.toml
|   |
|   +-- ...
|
+-- lib/
|
+-- projects/
|   +-- project/
|   |   +-- docs/
|   |   +-- project.toml
|   |
|   +-- ...
|
+-- ...

There's quite a bit to unpack here, so let's get to it!

components/

The components/ directory contains components that serve as the building blocks of a project.

Each component has a docs/ directory that contains symlinks to relevant documentation. These symlinks need to stay up to date as they will automatically get triggered for manual review on pull requests to ensure that documentation stays up to date. Having these symlinks also ensures that anyone who wishes to get up to speed on a component has a quick list of relevant documentation to read.

The src directory contains the source files. The contents and layout of this directory highly depend on the component language(s) and use case. It is best to see existing components to get a feel for it.

Finally, component.toml contains metadata related to the component.

can/

can/ describes the CAN networks of our projects. Here, you'll find definitions for networks, messages, and signals for OpenCAN to process.

docs/

The contributing guidelines cover the structure for documentation. You may notice that it closely follows the structure of selfdrive itself.

lib/

The lib/ directory contains shared libraries used in components. Since these are generalized pieces of software, the contents of each directory can wildly vary. Feel free to explore these directories if you're curious.

projects/

The projects/ directory contains projects that are composed of various components. Like a component, each project has a docs/ directory with symlinks to relevant documentation and a project.toml with related metadata.

What About Everything Else?

It'd be impractical to cover every last file and directory in selfdrive. Unfortunately, there's no shortcut to knowing where you can find everything or how various bits of code interact, but there are tools that can help!

• fd: a simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to find
• fzf: a command-line fuzzy finder
• rg: ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern

So What's Next?

Now that you have a general idea of how selfdrive works, it's time to move on to group-specific getting started guides. Feel free to move along to these without finishing all of the suggested missing semester lectures; however, understand they do nothing but benefit you!