Intro to Turtlebot

As no episode of DBWorkshop has materialised as yet your update gave me some bedtime reading ? .  It was interesting to read the background on ROS and Turlebot and the ROS idea is becoming clearer.  Although I do not have too much time at the mo to devote to all this I do hope to get the kit in place over the next month (ubuntu install, readying Rpi etc.)  I have found several of my normal installs are not yet working with Buster (lirc, netatalk...) so it may need to settle down a while yet.

And a good bedtime read it was too.  Looking forward to the next updates.

Posted by: @twobits

While waiting for packages to build I had some time today.

I wrote a new article on the Turtlebot, the ROS reference hardware, and its history. I must admit, that I have been wandering around deep in the weed of ROS with the install and compatibility stuff. It is boring as all get-out, but until you have a working system nothing else really matters:(

Hopefully, this article will provide a better understanding of:

• What ROS can do.
• What ROS brings to a robot similar to DB1.
• Plant some seeds on how to transfer code and knowledge to DB1_R1.

I think permalinks and navigation are finally. So, things won't jump around as much as they were.

As always, feedback appreciated so the articles can become a valuable set of resources for builders.

Please continue to report your updates to this forum so we will have one place to check for updates

Thank You !

When I first got my Nano I wanted Isaac, which was exactly (sort of) what I wanted my bot to do... Be a cart that follows me around, but, the final piece of that puzzle was installing the UnrealEngine, which wasn't at its suggested download link

Then I moved on to Jetbot, which was too small, but, would have been a good foundation, but one piece of hardware is unavailable

So I moved on to turtle, which is where I am now, but base unit is... we'll see how this goes. I had to contact the Atomic Pi manufacturer

Glad to have helped:)

I hope this format is a good compromise for everyone; Articles on the GitHub site with release alerts and discussions on this forum.

I would have liked to keep everything under one roof so to speak. But this is a good compromise from my point of view.

I like the idea that the legwork, which I am already doing for myself, is helping others.

David

Where I am now...

Got the Pi4 with turtlebot-slave installed. WiFi is still an issue, which I originally expected because they changed the wpa_supplicant between the 3B and the 3B+, but, since I got the one on my printer working, I thought I could figure this one out pretty easy

No such luck. It seems that the turtle software wants to create it's own network, and that network uses hostapd, which is "Host Access Point Deamon" in order to create it's own little private world to live in. I kept getting a message "wifi is disabled because the country code is not set", even tho I know I set it using raspi-config, so I went in and manually edited the

"/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf", 

to change the country code and insert the ssid and password, which didn't help at all. Now, normally, I would have changed the network name manually from "wlan_int" to "wlan0", but, if I'm interpreting what I've read correctly, this particular hostapd wants to use the mac address, so I'm going to leave that alone

I suppose I could stick another Pi in there as an access point, and hardwire the one to the other, which is an insanely stupid idea, but, not outside the realm of something I would actually do. On the other hand, without the master, I'm not sure what good the slave is by itself

The testing bot I built is as simple as I could make it with a couple of wheels, motors, an L298N a pixycam, and an arduino, which I have no idea why I added, but, it's there in case the software wants it

There are 4 input pins on the 298 which, when tested go to left forward, left backward, right forward, and right backward which I suppose I could connect to the Pi now, but, again, I have no idea yet what the turtle software wants to spit out or where it's going to spit it

Now, the turtle master is an issue. They didn't provide an img, but rather an iso. I tried to install it on an alienware laptop, but it kept locking up, then I tried to install it on the Atomic Pi (the iso is for an X86, which is what the Atomic Pi is, with an Atom processor). It simply refused to even notice that I was trying to load a new OS no matter what I did. I tried from a USB thumb drive, a micro SD card, and a USB dvd drive. A call to the manufacturer said to hit the reset button and try again, so I did, and it almost started to load, but ultimately didn't

So I tried a new software to burn the iso to the thumb drive, and again, it almost worked, so I decided to try something different. I nuked the sd card and installed it blank, then booted from the thumb drive, and it looked like it loaded, so I rebooted, and it got stuck on the loading screen

I've only got one more idea, and I need to get a new SSD drive for this idea. I've got an Atom powered Lenovo netbook that I want to try it on (once I get the SSD), and if that doesn't work, I'm out of ideas due to the fact that the turtle master is only written for X86, not ARM, so I don't have any other machines to try it on

So that's where I am now... off to the store to pick up an SSD

Dave hangs his head in shame and goes back to his table in the storeroom, which he optimistically calls his workshop, to finish the SBC install guide 🙁

The good news is that I got the ROS SLAM stuff I want to use to work on ROS Melodi on an RPi 3b+.  🙂 There is hope for using Melodic instead of Kinetic.

Posted by: @twobits

The good news is that I got the ROS SLAM stuff I want to use to work on ROS Melodi on an RPi 3b+.  🙂 There is hope for using Melodic instead of Kinetic.

That is good news.  I had not luck rebuilding Melodic on the RPi 3b+.  It got 57% of way through and then just hung up forever.  I assumed I ran out of processing space.  When I checked the forums all I could find were people saying Melodic wasn't supported on 3b+ yet.

Yep, I have been using an ancient USB drive as swap... Not exactly user-friendly.

As the external disk swaps, it hums in an unsettling manner. I have a newfound respect for modern M.2 SSDs with their speedy busses.

It seemed to work by trial and error on the last iteration. I have to see if it is repeatable.

If I can't repeat the process by tonight, I think I will just bite the bullet and order a Raspberry Pi 4 with 2G of memory. I was hoping to wait until RPi 4 rev 2 was out before I made the purchase.

Oops. My favorite getting spot is back-ordered to mid-august. 

@starnovice

I found that during heavy thinking, that if you insert an 8G or 16G thumb drive, and assign the whole thing as swap space, many times you can get past those heavy duty installs.

It's helped every time I tried to install TensorFlow

@twobits

LOL

I guess we had the same idea about the USB 🙂

I think Melodic was one of the first ones I tried. Can't remember why I didn't end up using it. Probably was the incorrect repository, which seems to happen all the time to me. That one is a big stopping point

Okay. I got the SSD

The turtle master wants 64bit, and this netbook is only 32

This is getting frustrating

While poking around the turtle website, I found some older downloads that don't say 64bit 

1.4G. Gonna take at least an hour

Does the Melodic that you managed to get running need a master ? Or is it self contained ?

And have you looked at SNIPS ?

@twobits

Okay. I got what I think might be the master (it was in the same folder) running. CLI only, and I can't ssh into it yet to get a good look at what's going on in there. But it's running. I'm working on the ssh, and, maybe there's a gui in there someplace

Wow.

It's Ubuntu 12.04