Getting Started

This Page describes how one can interact with the TriPed from a software standpoint. It starts with a guide on how to set up the Beaglebone followed by instructions on how to interact with the system and start its various components

Beaglebone Setup

Installing the Operating System

The Beaglebone uses the debian buster iot edition, which installed on the eMMC. To install it download the flashing image here.

The image has then be installed on a sd and subsequently installed on the BBB. A good tutorial can be found here.

Patching the Kernel with Xenomai

Mounting the SD card

After installing the operating system, the SD card can be flashed with the internal TriPed image that has all necessairy ros-packages pre installed.

To access these files, the SD card has to be mounted. This is done by opening /etc/fstab using

sudo nano /etc/fstab

And appending the line

/dev/mmcblk0p1 /sd auto rw,user,auto,exec,nofail 0 0

Afterwards the ownership of the SD card neesd to be altered to allow seemless writing and reading

sudo chown -R debian:debian /sd

Creating a Swap Partition

The catkin_make process which compiles the ROS code can be resource intensive. For this purpose it is advisable to create a swap partition. There are severall tutorials on how to do this, such as here. A swap file of 1Gb size is more than sufficient.

Disabling HDMI

To use all SPI ports of the Beaglebone the HDMI port has to be disabled. This is done by editing the file /boot/uEnv.txt and uncommenting the line disable_uboot_overlay_video=1

Sourcing ROS enviroment

In order to immediately acces the ROS commands upon connecting via ssh and communicate ROS topics via multiple systems, the following lines have to be appended to the .bashrc file:

source /sd/triped_app/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash
export ROS_IP=BEAGLEBONE_IP
export ROS_MASTER_URI=http://BEAGLEBONE_NAME:11311

where BEAGLEBONE_IP and BEAGLEBONE_NAME are the Beaglebones network IP and name respectively.