Ardurover on beaglebone blue?

I want to run ardurover on a beaglebone blue. So far I have

So far so good, except I don’t want arducopter in this project (berg crawler), I want ardurover.

The mirkix repo has me installing a deb (with apt). I think the next step is to uninstall it (and a bunch of node stuff that came preinstalled, that I don’t think I will never use). I’m not sure what to do after that though.

Should I clone master and head down the path of trying to build locally? Is there a deb for rover? is there work to do before rover can be used on a beaglebone blue?

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Hi Chris, I would try to cross compile on a more powerfull machine because it is way faster.
I use Ubuntu for compiling on my desktop pc. Compiling on the BBBlue board will take some more time (1-2 hours).

I thought of using a BBBlue on a rover as well but couldnt get one yet. I am keen how you like it and how it performs.

Cheers
Linus

Hi Linus. That’s good advice, it was quite slow to compile in place but I had plenty of other things to get on with while it was chugging away (such as sleep). As I’m currently inflicted with a Mac, so doing things that are simple in linux are never as easy as they should be. That’s why I ignored your suggestion and compiled in place. I don’t remember exact process I followed, but it was easy; looked at the waf script, frob frob frob, nice new build/blue/bin/ardurover binary that runs with sudo.

Rover build is stalled waiting for a bits and pieces to arrive in the mail, but I already like the lack of wires and onboard battery management; very convenient “on the bench”. First iteration of rover will have minimal components; bbblue, gps, DSM2 RX, power and actuators. I’ll use wifi for telemetry (don’t need range or reliability, this thing has a top speed of about 1.5 m/s). It’s very tidy.

The DSM-only RC input is slightly annoying, ideally i’d like PPM so I can have two transmitters/receivers in the rover with a PPM encoder (current 3 channel ground vehicle transmitter for the driver + copilot tx with knobs and switches for his dad). But I’ll deal with that using a RX and PPM encoder on copilot TX buddy box input. It just means both TX will need to be present for my son to drive it, whereas in simple RC configuration he currently enjoys driving it around on his own sometimes. I suppose I could probably figure something out with some of the ADCs on the BBBlue, or maybe just convert him to a TX with sticks.

The other slight imperfection is the fact the default image has multiple javascript frameworks of junk I am going to have to catalogue and purge. It’s like moving into a new house with a sink full of dirty dishes, more annoying than anything. These are both very minor complaints, I’m happy with it and think it’s a good choice for this project.

My next step will be to setup mavproxy and an init.d script (or however we do that these days) so it boots into “ready for business”. I have never done ardupilot on linux and have a silly noob question - how do I start the program and connect it to mavproxy?

Sounds great what you are planning! I start the binary like explained in mirko’s BBBmini docs:

/mnt/data/APM/bin/ardurover -C udp:target IP address:14550 -B /dev/ttyO5

Then i start Mavproxy in a screen session from a bash script:

/usr/bin/screen -dmS mavproxy /usr/local/bin/mavproxy.py --master=udp:0.0.0.0:14555 --out=udp:my GCS machine IP here:14550 --out=udp:another tablet GCS IP:14550 --daemon --nowait --state-basedir /mnt/store/data/logs --aircraft Pi3GCS --mission hostnameGCS --logfile gatemavproxy.tlog &

Works very nice :slight_smile:

@Linus

Hello Linus, did you get the BBBlue and successfully installed the ROVER code ?
I am just starting the project (as you know), and I am interested to know if anyone has made some progress on it yet. The new code is really interesting, and integrating the quadrature encoders is something the Blue already have available .

Best Regards

hi,

i am sorry to say but this project stalled completely on my side. I hope i can pick it up when fall is here, probably will take until winter.

sorry i cant help!
cheers
linus