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up_board_setup

Setting up the UP Board

This tutorial will guide students through the initial configuration of the Aeon UP Board by installing Ubuntu, ROS, and configuring the board for use with the included Realsense R200 camera. This tutorial assumes that students already have a bootable USB drive of Ubuntu for installation on the UP Board. At the time of writing this tutorial, the latest distribution is Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. If a bootable drive is needed, the ISO can be downloaded here and directions for creating a bootable USB using OS X, Windows, and Ubuntu Linux, here, here, and here respectively.


Step 1: Install Ubuntu on the UP Board

Pictures of cables
Start by booting the UP Board form the USB drive you created. Use two of the USB 2.0 ports for a keyboard and mouse, plug a monitor into the HDMI port, and the bootable drive into one of the remaining USB 2.0 ports. Finally, plug the power cable in to boot the board. After a few seconds, the UP ogo should appear, followed by GRUB bootloader. To install Ubuntu press the second option.

Picture of GRUB Bootloader

During the installation of Ubuntu you will be prompted to make a few decisions. These were the choices made for this installation:
Screen 1: Welcome Selected the default “English”
Screen 2: Preparing to install Ubuntu Did not check either of these options. Updating Ubuntu is covered in later steps.
Screen 3: Installation type Select the default “Erase disk an install Ubuntu” and continue to write changes to disk.
Screen 4: Where are you? Select your location/timezone. Las Vegas, Nevada in this case.
Screen 5: Keyboard layout English (US)
Screen 6: Who are you? Select you personal identification for your device. As these will be used in our lab, they are currently labeled numerically with identical passwords.

After the automated installation is complete, select the Restart Now option and wait for the UP Board logo to appear before disconnecting the power cable. While disconnected, remove the bootable USB drive, then reinsert the power cable to boot from the newly installed OS. Use either an Ethernet cable or WiFi adapter to connect to the internet as it will be required for future steps.


Step 2: Update Ubuntu for the UP Board

Now that Ubuntu is installed on the board, the software needs to be updated before we can install the new kernel. Open a terminal and enter the following commands.

sudo apt update
sudo apt -y dist-upgrade

Once these commands have finished, you can install the new kernel using these commands. Be sure to not skip the last command, as it removes the generic kernel allowing the UPboard to be the default.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubilinux/up
sudo apt update
sudo apt -y install linux-upboard
sudo apt -y autoremove --purge 'linux-.*generic'

Reboot the system to ensure you are running the new kernel and then use the uname command to verify. Output text should be similar to '4.4.0.2-upboard.'

sudo reboot
uname -r

Step 3: Provide Kernel Source Access and Install Latest RealSense Patches

Since the release of the UPboard Kernel there have been numerous patches made to enable more RealSense functionality. Before installing ROS and the associated RealSense packages, it is necessary to provide access to the kernel source packages. Use the following command to update the apt's source files.

wget -q -O - \
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/IntelRealSense/librealsense/rosdebian/scripts/enable_kernel_sources.sh\ 
| sudo /bin/bash

Now we can move onto installing ROS with RealSense support.


Step 4: Install ROS Kinetic Distribution

The board used in the Development kit only support Linux distributions and so we can not use the official RealSense SDK, as it is only supported for Windows systems. Instead, we use ROS, as it has packages for RealSense compatibility and is an easy method to interface with robotic platforms.

Launch a terminal shell and run the following commands to add the ROS repository to Ubuntu and update the package lists.

sudo add-spt-repository http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://ha.pool.sks-keyserver.net \
     --recv-key 0xB01FA116
sudo apt update

Now run these commands to install the base ROS software and RealSense packages

sudo apt -y install ros-kinetic-desktop-full python-rosinstall ros-kinetic-realsense-camera
sudo rosdep init
rosdep update
echo "source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Adding setup.bash to the .bashrc file ensures that the ROS framework is available in the active environment. The ros-kinetic-librealsense package adds patches to the kernel that can not take effect until the system has been rebooted. Run a reboot command then ensure the UPboard kernel is still in place.

sudo reboot
uname -r

Step 5: Verify Functionality by Launching a Nodelet

up_board_setup.txt · Last modified: 2017/01/05 20:01 by jadintredup