Ubiquity ROS Noetic Raspberry Pi Image Beta

Pi Image
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Hi Everyone,

We are happy to announce that we are ready for the first public beta of our long-awaited Ubuntu 20.04 + ROS Noetic image.

You can download the beta here: https://ubiquity-pi-image.sfo2.digitaloceanspaces.com/2021-08-06-focal.img.xz (~900MB)

Please note the following:

  • The firmware upgrade script in ubiquity_motor does not work, we are still in the process of the Python 3 port.
  • There is no GUI installed by default, if someone figures out how to get LXQT from Lubuntu started properly please let me know.
  • roscore and magni-base still start on boot, if you don’t want this please disable roscore.service and magni-base.service respectively.
  • This is still an 32-bit armhf image, so ROS2 is not available over apt-get. Because raspicam/mmal support for 64-bit arm64 is still a work in progress, we decided to stick with 32 bit for now.
  • The image is pretty minimal, there are probably a lot of packages that should be installed but aren’t
  • Ethernet is handled by systemd-networkd instead of ifupdown. The ifupdown service is not installed, so changes /etc/network/interfaces will have no effect. This may change before the final release.
  • Locales aren’t properly generated in the image build, so you will likely see many locale warnings
  • pifi buttons and leds are not working at the moment.

The pifi SSID will be pi-focalXXXX and the wifi password is still robotseverywhere. The Linux login is still ubuntu with the password ubuntu.

Lets also keep all the discussion of this beta image in this thread.

Rohan
Ubiquity Robotics

Like our work? You can send us a tip on Paypal: tips@ubiquityrobotics.com

2 Likes
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I don’t know about the LXQT GUI but the lxde GUI is easy just connect to the internet and run sudo apt-get install lxde and apt-get install xinit then reboot. This is a very light version of linux so there not many programs installed.

3

This doesn’t seem to boot for me on a pi4, I’ve downloaded it twice. Is Pi4 supported?

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Is that one of the newer rev 1.4 Pi 4 that you have there? Those need an extra kernel patch, at least they did on Xenial. It’s possible the patch hasn’t made it to this image yet, in which case you won’t be able to boot yes.

The rev 1.1 and 1.2 should be fully supported though.

5

Is this still our latest noetic image?

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Is there any planned update or roadmap for Noetic releases? We’ve been having some issues getting this running on a new project.

7

DO NOT UNDER ANY SITUATION DO A FIRMWARE UPGRADE USING THE NOETIC IMAGE!

IT IS A KNOWN UNFINISHED FEATURE THAT EASILY CAN RENDER YOUR MCB DEAD!

We do say as 1st point in this thread it ‘does not work’ but we do NOT stress the deadly risk to the MCB at all when we said that point.

The image is EXPERIMENTAL. Sorry we did not make this VERY VERY clear earlier! We know it internally and have been working on it for months but it is not ready yet! Soon we hope but not yet!