Remember when I said that I will upgrade the chasis of my rovers? I’ve finally did it!
It is still half done, but I would like to share the journey that I made so far.
I’ve recently got my a new laptop for work, which is great, but this means I had to abandon all the comfort of OSX.
Of course for work I need an Ubuntu system but I set my eyes on a distribution called Elementary OS before, that is Ubuntu-based but tries to mimic the style of OSX.
To begin the ROS installation a minor tweak is needed on the first step. Instead of
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'
use
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu trusty main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'
Since ROS doesn’t have packages dedicated to Elementary, this second line tells it to use the Ubuntu Trusty packages instead (on which Elementary OS Freya is based).
However, when I tried to start up the simulation of TIAGo, I got buckets of errors from rosdep about the operating system not being detected. After a quick sneak peak at the code of it, I discovered that there is an environmental variable that can be used to override whatever is happening, as rosdep is supposed to support Elementary OS, it’s the latter that does something fishy here.
I added
export ROS_OS_OVERRIDE=elementary
to my .bashrc, and the problem was solved.
Here is a video of the working system, with the TIAGo robot from PAL Robotics.
So those are my notes on the Elementary OS + ROS topic. For those who’d like to get started with Elementary OS check the links below.
Elementary OS goodies to install,
20 things to do after installing Elementary OS
Do you like Evernote‘s desktop client? NixNote2 provides a fully cross-platform opensource alternative to the official client.
To see if and where your boot process can be optimized, try bootcharting
To see what you can do with your Thinkpad fans and in Linux go here.
I have started to update my old projects with Beaglebone Black and ROS Indigo version.
![20150823_103948[1]](https://fleshandmachines.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/20150823_1039481.jpg)
Before ROS installation the best option is to install the Ubuntu 14.04(LTS) arm version. It is recommended because package install will be available for ROS and there’s no need to build the them.
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Oh by the way, I’ve just realised that I forgot to publish my Master’s Thesis here. It’s getting a bit old, pages turning yellow but I can still find typos in it! 🙂
https://www.dropbox.com/s/k34vyfgms1jasme/msc_bence.pdf?dl=0
(Let me know if the download is buggy.)
Robot! There is plenty of content already so I do not wish to repeat anyone.
The links below should provide plenty of information about this cool fella!
http://tiago.pal-robotics.com/en/
http://www.ros.org/news/2015/02/new-mobile-manipulator-tiago-robot.html
If it comes to complex robotics software I’m always looking for ROS. I wanted to be able to use it on my BeagleBone but Ubuntu was not satisfying so I though of keeping Angstrom since it is the ‘official’ distribution of the board but I had trouble with installing ROS onto it. The final solution was to install Debian Squeeze on the BeagleBone so ROS can go on the top of this. The importance of Debian is that it supports all hardware interfacing features Angstrom does (PWM, GPIO, Analog). First I tried Fuerte but there were some problems and I don’t really need any fancy stuff yet so I went back to Electric. 
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