I’ve been doing a stock take of what robotics components I have available. I think now I should bite the bullet and go for the build of my Omnibot based robot.
These are the steps I took to setup a VMWare image ready to run ROS.
Planned Hardware
- Acer Aspire One Netbook (1.6GHz Atom, 1Gb RAM, 160Gb HDD)
- Arduino (or clone, possibly Arduino MEGA for the I/O)
- DAGU 4Channel Motor controller (handles a 4Amp stall current)
- Gutted Tomy Omibot/Robbie Snr. (Circa 1984)
Install Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick)
- 512Mb Ram
- 20Gb disk space
Configure package manager
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu maverick main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list' wget http://packages.ros.org/ros.key -O - | sudo apt-key add - sudo apt-get update
Install ROS Desktop Full Install
sudo apt-get install ros-diamondback-desktop-full echo "source /opt/ros/diamondback/setup.bash" >> ~/bin/.bashrc_ford source ~/bin/.bashrc_ford
Other neat fixes
sudo su - root
echo 'SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", KERNEL=="ttyUSB[0-9]*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0403", ATTRS{idProduct}=="6001", SYMLINK+="sensors/ftdi_%s{serial}"' > /etc/udev/rules.d/52-ftdi.rules
Will create symlinks to the /dev/ttyUSB[0-9] device in /dev/sensors for all FTDI chips connected. (i.e. Arduinos) This is very useful to make sure you always connect to the same Arduino after a system restart if you have multiple devices.
$ ls /dev/sensors /dev/sensors/ftdi_A60078HS -> ../ttyUSB0