Category: Qt

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/

stepping up to linux mint 22.1

whbeebe

It’s been several days since I stepped up to Linux Mint 22.1. No fuss, just a bit of exploring to tweak the desktop look to use the new Cinnamon styling. I was also pleased to be able to change the size of my menu and have it stick, once set. I’m still using the Papirus icon theme and Nerd Fonts for everything. Linux Mint is still based on Ubuntu 24.04, which is fine as far as I’m concerned. All the software tools I use are reasonably current but not bleeding edge; for example Python on Linux Mint 22.1 is version 3.12.3, while the absolute bleeding edge is version 3.13.1. Even Python 3.12 is at 3.12.8, which tends to irk me as to why the distribution can’t at least keep up with its latest Python baseline. I suspect it’s due to Ubuntu itself.

I do much prefer this release over anything I could get from Microsoft. Everything in my house is either macOS or Linux, split about 50/50. I spend the majority of my time on a Linux system, which explains why I won’t purchase a new Apple computer in the future. I’m going to run everything I have until it literally dies and can’t be upgraded or fixed. For example, my primary Linux system is a Minis Forum UM250 with an AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 2500U CPU. That AMD CPU was launched in 2019. I got the UM250 system in 2020 with Windows 10 Pro preinstalled. It ran for about a year with Windows 10 until I started to get indications that Microsoft wanted to upgrade to Windows 11, but wouldn’t allow the UM250 to upgrade because the little system didn’t have TPM 2.0 installed. It was at that point I purchased a new SSD for the system, swapped it in, and switched to Linux.

My transition to Linux Mint wasn’t straightforward. I tried Pop!_OS and Fedora before finally settling on Linux Mint. The biggest annoyance with both was their insistance of installing and activating brltty, a special Braille driver for the blind. I can certainly appreciate making computers available to the visually challenged, but I’m not one of those (yet), and there wasn’t any way to easily disable the feature for regular use. The brltty driver interfered with my ability to use my USB ports for embedded (IoT) development. I was able to uninstall it for Fedora, but Pop!_OS had it so deeply embedded in the OS that any attempt to remove it would cripple the desktop. In the end for Pop!_OS I had to use systemd to disable the service. Considering how much aggravation I went through for that one problem, I was quick to switch away to Linux Mint, and that’s where I’ve lived ever since.

I have a solid computer with a no-drama operating system that reliably does its job, day-in and day-out. I don’t want or need anything more than that.