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ROS2 Installation

Currently, we provide a few methods to install ROS2 and the epuck_ros2 package. The following table compares the installation methods:

Using Pi-puck Image Compilation on the Raspberry Pi Cross-compilation on your PC
Compilation speed ++ - +
Easy to use ++ - --
Flexibility - ++ +

Using Pi-puck Image

This is the recommended way of installing ROS2 on pi-puck as all ROS2 compilation issues are resolved by us. Moreover, this is very fast as you don't have to wait for the compilation process to finish. It is enough to download our image and burn it to a SD card that has to be at least 8GB. To burn the image on the SD card you can use the following command on Linux:

dd bs=4M if=path_to_pi_puck_image.img of=/dev/sdX conv=fsync

It is very important to provide a correct output device name, it is usually /dev/sdb (not /dev/sdb1). To check whether the block device is the one associated with the SD card you can run before inserting the SD card ls /dev/sd*, then insert the SD card and run the same command again and compare the output. For more detailed instructions on how to burn an image to the SD card for different operating systems you can check the following links:

Detailed instructions for burning SD card on: Windows, Mac and Linux

Wifi and SSH

Once the image is burned on SD card you may want to configure the Wi-Fi connection. By default, the pi-puck with the provided image will try to connect to a Wi-Fi network with the SSID E-PUCK. If you want to change the default behavior or to add more networks you can add networks to /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf (file located on the SD card). For example:

network={
    ssid="my_network_ssid"
    psk="my_network_password"
    key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
}

Detailed instructions on Wi-Fi configuration can be found here.

At this point, you probably want to start the nodes from epuck_ros2. First, make sure that your pi-puck and computer are connected to the same local network. You can ping the pi-puck using:

ping raspberrypi.local

Or, if your device doesn't support mDNS you will need to use nmap to discover pi-puck's IP address.

Then, connect to the pi-puck via SSH:

ssh pi@raspberrypi.local

with raspberry as a default password.

More about SSH and Raspberry Pi can be found here.

ROS2 installation is located in /home/pi/ros2_ws, so you can navigate inside and start epuck_ros2 driver with:

source install/local_setup.bash
ros2 launch webots_ros2_epuck2 robot_launch.py

Creating Custom Image

Once the installation is complete, or you developed a custom node, you may want to save the configuration and quickly distribute it to the other robots by creating your own image. To achieve that, you can simply put the SD card in your computer and copy its content to a .img file:

dd if=/dev/sdX of=path_to_pi_puck_image.img

The image size will be equal (if expanded before) to your SD card size even though the content of the image is much smaller. To shrink the image, use the following command:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Drewsif/PiShrink/master/pishrink.sh | sudo bash -s -- path_to_pi_puck_image.img

Now, burn the path_to_pi_puck_image.img to other SD cards that will be used in other pi-pucks.

Starting epuck_ros2 on Boot

In most of the cases, ROS2 development will take place on your computer and ROS2 will take handle the communication between the local nodes and nodes on the pi-puck. In that scenario, you may want to execute epuck_ros2 as soon as pi-puck boots without manual intervention. To achieve this, it is enough to populate /etc/rc.local with the following commands:

source /home/pi/ros2_ws/install/local_setup.bash
ros2 launch webots_ros2_epuck2 robot_launch.py

More about /etc/rc.local and Raspberry Pi OS can be found here