WireOS

The main repo for WireOS.

WireOS serves as a nice, stable, and maintained base for Vector CFW.

This builds the OS, the /anki programs (wire-os-victor), and puts it all into a final OTA. This repo can be thought of as wire-os-oelinux.

Submodules

• /poky/poky -> yoctoproject/poky (master)
• /poky/meta-openembedded -> openembedded/meta-openembedded (master)
• /anki/victor -> wire-os-victor (main)
  • Where all the personality code lives - the README there has more info
• /anki/wired -> wired (main)
  • Little webserver with configuration options

Prebuilt OTA:

WireOS is in the dropdown box in https://devsetup.froggitti.net/. Put your unlocked bot into recovery mode (hold the button for 15 seconds on the charger), head to the site, choose wireOS, then go through the process.

Build

• Note: you will need a somewhat beefy x86_64 Linux machine with at least 16GB of RAM and 100GB of free space.

1. Install Docker, git, and wget.

2. Configure Docker so a regular user can use it:

sudo groupadd docker
sudo gpasswd -a $USER docker
newgrp docker
sudo chown root:docker /var/run/docker.sock
sudo chmod 660 /var/run/docker.sock

3. Clone and build:

git clone https://github.com/os-vector/wire-os --recurse-submodules
cd wire-os
./build/build.sh -bt <dev/oskr> -bp <boot-passwd> -v <build-increment>
# boot password not required for dev
# example: ./build/build.sh -bt dev -v 1
# <build-increment> is what the last number of the version string will be - if it's 1, it will be 3.0.1.1.ota

Where is my OTA?

./_build/3.0.1.1.ota

Development path

• Most work should be done in wire-os-victor. Generally, that's all you need to have cloned. That can be worked on on a less beefy Linux laptop or M-series MacBook. If you have a modern base WireOS OTA installed; you can clone wire-os-victor, make changes, build that standalone, and deploy that to your robot. This repo is more meant to be cloned to a build server, and built less often.

Donate

If you want to :P

Differences compared to normal Vector FW

• New OS base
  • Yocto Whinlatter rather than Jethro
    • glibc 2.42 (latest as of 08-2025)
• victor software compiled with Clang 18.1.8 rather than 5.0.1
  • The code is properly fixed so there are no compile warnings
• Rainbow eye color
  • Can be activated in :8888/demo.html
• Some Anki-era PRs have been merged
  • Performances
    • He will somewhat randomly do loosepixel and binaryeyes
  • Better camera gamma correction
    • He handles too-bright situations much better now
• Picovoice Porcupine (1.5) wakeword engine
  • Custom wake words in :8080 webserver!
• htop and rsync are embedded
• Python 3.13 rather than Python 2
• General bug fixes - for instance, now he won't read the EMR partition upon every single screen draw (DDL bug)
• :8080 webserver for configuring things I don't want to integrate into a normal app
• Cat and dog detection (basic, similar to Cozmo)
• Smaller OTA size - a dev OTA is 171M somehow
• New Anki boot animation, new pre-boot-anim splash screen, rainbow backpack light animations
• TensorFlow Lite has been updated to v2.19.0 (latest as of 07-2025)
  • This means we can maybe leverage the GPU delegate at some point
  • XNNPACK - the CPU delegate - is faster than what was there before
• OpenCV has been updated to 4.12.0 (latest as of 07-2025)
  • Much better SDK streaming performance
• Face overlays - How to activate: wire-os-victor PR #17
• Global SSH key: (ssh_root_key)

Helpful scripts

• anki-debug
  • If you are debugging victor and want to see backtraces in /var/log/messages, run this to enable those.
• ddn [on/off]
  • Turns on/off DevDoNothing, which makes the bot stand still until shaken.
• reonboard
  • Puts him back into onboarding mode without fully clearing user data
• vmesg [-c|-t] <grep args>
  • A wrapper for cat/tail /var/log/messages:
• temper
  • Simple script which tells you CPU temps

usage: vmesg [-t|-c] <grep args>
this is a helper tool for viewing Vector's /var/log/messages
if no grep args are provided, the tailed/whole log will be given
-t = tail (-f), -c = cat
example for searching: vmesg -t -i "tflite\|gpu"
example for whole log: vmesg -c

Proprietary software notes

• This repo contains lots of proprietary Qualcomm code and prebuilt software.
• After a stupid amount of work, I have most HAL programs compiling with Yocto's GCC 15. It wasn't terribly difficult since it's generally all autotools, but some jank is still involved, and it was still time-consuming.
• The camera programs and some of the BLE programs are being copied in rather than compiled.
  • Why not compile camera programs? Because I would have to add 2GB to the repo and figure out how to use the weird Qualcomm-specific toolchain.
  • Why not compile those BLE programs? ankibluetoothd and hci_qcomm_init are able to compile under GCC 15, but there is some weird low-level issue which makes them unable to properly communicate with a BLE library. So, for now, I am just copying pre-compiled ones in. I will probably try to fix this at some point.

How this upgrade was done

• Much work upgrading Yocto recipes.
• All of the software is compiling with Yocto's GCC 15 or the Clang 18.1.8 vicos-sdk toolchain, with a couple of tiny exceptions.
• Some recipes are still somewhat old - these include wpa_supplicant and connman (I had issues with SAE - he's able to recognize SAE networks, but his WLAN driver and kernel don't know how to actually connect to it, and I was unable to disable it in modern wpa_supplicant and connman)