rosbeam

A ROS driver for BeamPro and Beam+

NOTICE

This repository was established purely for the purpose of knowledge dissemination and access to open source. This repository will not be actively maintained. We provide no promise of responding to issues and pull requests submitted to this repository.

WARNING

In addition to the disclaimers above and in LICENSE, note that this work is experimental development on open source systems for the purposes of academic research. Please take extra precautions during operation.

Installation

Dependency: Boost (libboost-all-dev on Debian/Ubuntu), cmake, make, python and virtualenv (apt-get install virtualenv or apt-get install python-virtualenv or pip install virtualenv), gcc 4.8 (tested version)

Build instructions:

cd build
make 
sudo make install

During make, there can be git checkout errors caused by network interruptions. Rerun make to continue.

This will generate a tarball overlay.tgz inside the build directory. sudo here will not touch anything outside the build directory. It is only for installing root UID and setuid.

make clean will clear out temporary build files. make cleanall will remove the cache of downloaded sources.

Deployment

• Power off Beam
• Extract the SD card from the back of Beam
• Mount it (showing as /media/$USERNAME/RPD-STORE on Ubuntu, or manually mount /dev/mmcblk0p2 /mnt on Debian)
• Configure wifi_dev_mode sudo touch /mnt/config/wifi_dev_mode
• sudo cp overlay.tgz /mnt/images/
• Edit /mnt/config/release/target to add - /store/images/overlay.tgz as the last "layer".
• Unmount the SD card and put it back.

BeamPlus

BeamPlus has only two external USB ports with no Ethernet port or external SD card.

• Connect a USB keyboard to BeamPlus
• Plug in a USB drive with bootable image (Ubuntu LiveCD, Debian installer, etc.)
• Power on, press F7 to enter boot menu, boot from USB
• Mount RPD-STORE partition at /mnt: mount /dev/sda2 /mnt, and access it as above

Running

• You can connect to Beam with an Ethernet cable. The network should be configured as 192.168.68.2/255.255.255.0. Beam will be 192.168.68.1.
• export ROS_HOSTNAME=192.168.68.2 ROS_MASTER_URI=http://192.168.68.2:11311
• roscore
• ssh st@192.168.68.1 rosbeam-bridge.sh, password is st.

Now you will be able to see ROS topics.

With python-pygame installed, you can drive Beam with python drive.py (leave the cursor in the window during driving).

Controlling Beam over WIFI is not recommended but possible.

• First find out the IP address of Beam $BEAM_WIFI_IP over WIFI: ssh st@192.168.68.1 ip addr
• Restart the bridge: ssh st@$BEAM_WIFI_IP 'pkill rosbeam-bridge && rosbeam-bridge.sh'

BeamPlus

On BeamPlus there is no Ethernet access in the first place, apply this change to platform.sh

diff --git a/build/examples/platform.sh b/build/examples/platform.sh
index d12c972..e0a86ff 100644
--- a/build/examples/platform.sh
+++ b/build/examples/platform.sh
@@ -27,5 +27,8 @@ if [ -e /store/config/wifi_dev_mode ]; then
     sed -i "s#'usermod'[^]]*#'usermod', '-p' '\$6\$PasswordIsst\$DIRmCphmakWh8VunZU/roAkHBpBs3ArsofO85taMcp77Fp7b3fZ3wy9W5yTvT/CXA96Jbsw9okC4WStHwqC.T0', 'st'#" /home/st/sw-dev/install/scripts/rpd_setup.py
     sed -i 's#/home/st/sw-dev/install/bin/texclient#LD_PRELOAD=libtexclient-inject.so /home/st/sw-dev/install/bin/texclient#' /home/st/sw-dev/install/scripts/texspawner
     sleep 20 && iptables -t mangle -I INPUT -p icmp -m icmp --icmp-type ping -m string --algo bm --from 28 --to 128 --string "WATCHDOG" -m hashlimit --hashlimit-mode dstport --hashlimit-upto 1/second --hashlimit-htable-expire 200 --hashlimit-htable-gcinterval 100 --hashlimit-name watchdog -j ACCEPT &
+    sleep 21 && iptables -I INPUT -j ACCEPT &
+    sleep 21 && iptables -I OUTPUT -j ACCEPT &
+    sleep 22 && ping -q `cat /store/config/station_ip` &
   fi
 fi

Then echo $YOUR_IP > /store/config/station_ip. After Beam boots up, use wireshark/tcpdump to capture ICMP packets locally and detect the IP address of Beam.

Uninstalling

ssh to Beam, and rm /store/config/wifi_dev_mode will disable all modifications.

rm /store/images/overlay.tgz and remove overlay.tgz from /store/config/release/target will completely remove all modidications.