Category: Robotics

robot operating system 2 on raspberry pi 5

whbeebe
ROS 2 running TurtleSim with two turtles, rqt, and two control consoles

This is the Raspberry Pi 5 (hereafter just Pi5) that I’ve been working with since late 2024, with Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS for the Pi5 installed. It’s been my ambition for some time to build a sophisticated robot around this type of platform (a Raspberry Pi running Linux), more so that what I’ve been tinkering with for some time. I had originally thought to use something based on the early nVidia Orin SBCs, but that fizzled in the late 2010s when I discovered the rough state of the software platform. I had begun to hear about Robot Operating System, or ROS, but did nothing substantive with it until very recently. I’ve now installed ROS 2 on my main system under Linux Mint 22.1 and on my Pi5. I wanted to be able to switch back and forth in case I ran into any issues on the Pi5, to see if the same issues were also on the Linux Mint system.

I also wanted to see if I could indeed install ROS on Linux Mint. ROS officially supports just a few Linux distributions, one of which is Ubuntu 24.04. Since Linux Mint is downstream from Ubuntu, meaning Linux Mint 22.1 is derived from Ubuntu 24.04.1, ROS theoretically should install without issue on my Linux Mint system. Sure enough, it did, and it appears to operate properly so far.

I have more tutorials to get through, and as I said above I’ve not run into any problems. Well, perhaps a little one, easily fixed. When you start rqt the first time, the services are not populated. Close rqt and then reopen it and the services will be properly populated. The tutorial instructions are more complicated than that, but I don’t think they’re necessary.

I’m hoping to reach a point where I can begin to integrate hardware into the software platform sometime in February, and later, a local LLM for autonomous control.

Links

ROS — Robot Operating System — https://www.ros.org/

amazon deepracer – amazon pushes delivery back even further to the right

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I got another email from Amazon this past week telling me, once again, that there is a delay in delivering the AWS DeepRacer. Here’s the gist of the email:

We know you are eager to get your hands on your own AWS DeepRacer car. However, we remain behind in our goal to put these fully-autonomous, machine learning-powered cars into customers’ hands. As part of preparing for retail availability, we implemented a new and improved car battery design, but it’s turned out to be harder than we thought to get all of the required certifications. We believe we’re finally on a path to achieving what we desire, but we anticipate it’ll take until sometime in the Fall before these new devices will be ready to ship. As part of this delay, you may have noticed that we changed the product status to “email me when available” on the Amazon.com DeepRacer detail page. Rest assured, your pre-order is unaffected, and you are at the top of the list when we’re ready to ship the device. We’ll update the Amazon.com status as soon as we have an availability date to share.

I looked back on the order page, and down at the bottom, where they have questions and answers, I discovered I would have had one already if I’d attended the re:Invent 2018, back last December. Sucks to be me I guess. I haven’t seen anything this bad since I participated in buying a TravelWide camera via Kickstarter. I can understand the Kickstarter project, as this was being run buy a few passionate photographers. And they were honest and communicative as to what and why they were delayed.

Amazon, however, has absolutely no excuse. If the owner can spend $1B a year so he can send his rockets to the edge of space, if Amazon can run a multi-tentacled world-wide technological empire, then somebody who is a mere minion for Amazon can get their shit together on the design and ship the product. I placed my order the last day of 2018. It shouldn’t have taken this long to build out more.