ROSpberryPi

A quick and dirty way of bootstrapping ROS and some additional tools onto a Raspberry Pi Zero / W. (well, maybe not quick, it still takes more than an hour to complete the script and get everything installed)

FAQ:

Why?

• Recent ROS distributions only support ROS on the Raspberry pi 2B or greater (all arm7l devices) and on Ubuntu Mate. The Raspberry Pi Zero/W is an arm6l device, so you if you want ROS on it you must compile it yourself which is a bit of a pain. So I put together all of my work in a separate repository so others can take advantage of a prebuilt ROS Melodic setup.
• You can pick up a Pi Zero / W for a little as $5, which opens up all kinds of options for small projects
• If you operate the Pi Zero as headless you can do all of your development work on another machine, and just push the code to the zero. My current setup has:
  • the pi zero w set up as an access point (using create_ap)
  • connect to it from my laptop using ssh/putty.
  • the ros src directory is shared and you can connect to it from \\(whatever your pi zero w ip address is)\ros
  • open the shared folder in visual studio code

How?

• I downloaded and configured all of the required sources and compiled them on a Raspberry Pi 3 (I wouldn't recommend trying to compile them directly on a zero). Next I packaged up the installs using checkinstall and hosted them on my google drive. Then I wrote a script which grabs everything necessary for a functional ROS Melodic install.

What works?

• Almost everything! (As far as I know)

What doesn't work?

• rviz can't seem to load urdf/stl files without crashing (but you shouldn't be running these tools on the zero anyways)
• visual studio code will not work on a pi zero (it relies on electron, which only compiles for the arm7l, and the pi zero is an arm6l)

Will this work on any Raspberry Pi?

• In theory this should work on any Raspian Stretch install from the zero and original A+ to the 3B+.

Will this work on a Pi 2B/3B/3B+?

• In theory, but for those devices it would be much easier to just install ubuntu mate and use the official packages

Requirements:

• A Raspberry Pi Zero (preferably a W)
• Raspbian Stretch (Desktop or Minimal)
• An Internet connection

What this script installs:

• A compatible version of TinyXML
• A compatible precompiled arm6l version of OpenCV3
• A compatible precompiled arm6l version of
  • ROS Melodic Desktop
  • ROS Melodic Perception (minus the pcl stuff)
  • ROS Melodic Robot
  • ROS Melodic Joy(stick)
  • All Dependencies
• Tensorflow
• Increases Swap to 1GB
• GPIZero libraries
• Installs create_ap (ability to use raspi zero w as access point)
• Initializes a ROS workspace
• Sets up a SAMBA Fileshare for the /home/pi/ros/src directory
• Sets up all env variables for ROS melodic and your ros workspace

How to set this up

1. Download and install Raspbian Stretch (Desktop or Lite) onto a microsd card
2. Log into the pi and set it up to access the internet
   • with full desktop, just use the UI https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wireless/desktop.md
   • with lite, using raspi-config https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wireless/wireless-cli.md
   • with lite, by configuring two files in the /boot directory https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wireless/headless.md
   • with lite, using a UART (going headless) https://learn.adafruit.com/raspberry-pi-zero-creation
3. If you're feeling adventurous, maybe overclock the zero a bit (I'm not recommending you do this and I'm not going to walk you through how -- but possible settings are)

    # https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=177743#p1169042
    # 10% overclock
    arm_freq=1100
    over_voltage=8
    sdram_freq=500
    sdram_over_voltage=2
    force_turbo=1
    boot_delay=1
    dtparam=sd_overclock=100
   

4. Open up a command prompt and type in the following commands.

   git clone https://github.com/alansrobotlab/rosberrypizero
   cd rosberrypizero
   

5. Read through the install script so you understand what you're about to do. (You're not the type of person that runs random scripts you download from the internet are you?)

   nano bootstrap.sh
   

6. Run the bootstrap script and go get a cup of coffee.

   sh bootstrap.sh
   

7. Review the results of the bootstrap script, looking for any errors
8. Carefully read the last lines of the bootstrap script.

   OK, now there are a few more things that you need to do
   before you can get started.
   First, run the following command in a command prompt
   to set the samba filesharing password
   for user 'pi'\n (Must be at least 8 characters)
   
   sudo smbpasswd -a pi
   
   
   Next, disconnect from your wifi network and run
   the following command to set up your pi as an access point
   
   sudo iw wlan0 disconnect (to disconnect wifi)
   sudo systemctl enable create_ap (set access point to begin automatically on startup)
   sudo systemctl start create_ap (to start the create_ap access point)
   
   
   Finally, run the following command to enable ssh, the camera and i2c
   
   sudo rc-gui (for the gui config tool) \n\
   sudo raspi-config (for the command line tool) \n"
   

9. http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials
10. If you ever want to grab an updated version of this repository

    cd ~/.rosberrypizero # whereever you cloned this repository
    git pull