Hey there, first off welcome to the forums and thank you for the kind words!
I tried to reproduce this locally but without some of the source code I wasn’t able to get very far. Do you have a snippet of the files from libs/WiringPi and ros_ws/src that we could try to reproduce with? Even just some sample code so we can get past the initial commands. I tried to skip straight to catkin_make but it expects some src files.
Are you pushing these images to the balenaCloud platform or using them elsewhere with docker? If you’re pushing the 2nd image to a balenaCloud app anyway you could try using our ARM builders without the cross-build commands. With the balena CLI it’s just a matter of balena push <app>.
Offhand I can’t think of why the behaviour would be different with cross-build enabled but I haven’t used ROS personally. We would still like to figure out why the cross-build command doesn’t work though, so any assistance is appreciated!