BrickPi and Raspberry Pi 2 running ROS

BrickPi
#1

Hi,
I consider buying the BrickPi for making a simple mobile robot out of LEGO and its sensors having it controlled by a Raspberry Pi 2.

I’m trying to learn ROS (Robot Operating System), and thought that working on some concrete hardware would be more fun and instructive.

Have any of you tried to interface the BrickPi through ROS? If not, do you know how big a task it would be to make it run?

I’m new to both the BrickPi and ROS. I have ROS Indigo running on the Raspberry Pi 2 (http://wiki.ros.org/indigo/Installation/UbuntuARM).

Thanks and Regards,
Andreas

#2

Hey Andreas, we haven’t tried interfacing BrickPi through ROS yet. But it sounds like an awesome project, and we’d lvoe to hear more about it. I think we’ve seen issues with Ubuntu being able to read and write over serial; hav eyou tried integrating the Ubuntu image with any serial sensors? Best, John

#3

Hi John. Thanks for your reply.

Actually, I have no specific experience in interfacing hardware from a linux machine - but I would really like to learn how to do so :slight_smile:

Is it correct understood that the RPi interfaces both the ATMEGAs via a UART connection?

So once I learn how to read/write over the serial connection, I can essentially apply your driver?

Do I have to install some driver in order to make use of the UART of the RPi or is that part of the distribution?

Best Regards,
Andreas

#4

Hey Andreas, that’s right. Both Atmegas are interfaced over serial/UART connection. And that’s right, you should in theory be able to use the existing code, you’ll just need to figure out how your programming language talks over python and make those adjustments. We haven’t had any success with Ubunutu, but we haven’t dug too deep on the subject.

Installing the driver: no, you won’t need to do that from our perspective. YOu may need to make some changes to Ubuntu to get it to talk over serial though.

Best, John

#5

I’m a newbie, so forgive me if I I’m saying something stupid… Just ordered a Brickpi and I wouldn’t mind playing with ROS in the future, so this interests me.

Can’t ROS be installed on top of Raspbian for Robot? RfRobots is based on Raspbian Jessie, right? I see installation instructions for ROS on Jessie. Wouldn’t that solve those serial/UART issues?

Regards,

JD