PandaBoard Bail?

[Wayne C. Gramlich]

All:

Between us, Bill and I have two PandaBoards. One no longer
boots at all. The other boots, but will not operate the
WiFi. My recollection is that Osman is having similar
issues. My original hope was that the PandaBoard would build
a community as large and vibrant as the BeagleBoard (and now
BeagleBone.) That does not appear to have happened.

I am leaning towards dumping the PandaBoard. I'm thinking
towards using a Raspberry Pi instead. At least with the
RasPi, I can probably post questions on one of the RasPi
forums and have a reasonable hope of getting an answer.

Any thoughts?

Regards,

-Wayne

[Osman Eralp]

It is true that the wifi stopped working on my PandaBoard. One day it was working, and the next day it wasn't. I didn't change anything. I put in an old SD card with a known good image and found the wifi didn't work with the that image too, so it looks like a hardware problem. I searched with Google to see if this is a common problem. It is not a common problem. Maybe Wayne and I have just been unlucky.

My requirement for a mid-range processor board is that it must run OpenCV reasonably well. For me, "reasonably well" means tracking a colored object at 10 fps. If the PI can do that, I'm all in.

I see my robot on-board processor options aligning like this:

• For simple tasks, such as reading sensors, use a ARM Cortex Mx.
  
• For behavior and simple computer vision tasks, use a Raspberry Pi.
• For complex computer vision tasks, use an Atom or Core processor.

The unknown bit is OpenCV on the RPi. I've used OpenCV on the PandaBoard. I'll try to get it running on my RPi.

--Osman

 

[Wayne C. Gramlich]

All:

I basically agree with Osman's comments below:

With regards to high performance OpenCV, I think we need to focus
on platforms that already run it well rather than hoping that we
can "buy first" and "run later". I think that OpenCV is heading
in the general direction of OpenCL/CUDA, but I do where they are
at the moment. If anybody has additional knowledge to suggest what
a reasonable high performance OpenCV platform is, I'm all ears.

With regards to the RasPi, I view it as a Wi-Fi/Ethernet connection
(via a Wi-Fi dongle), USB host, and some GPIO. It can run Python
and C/C++ and ROS. I have no expectation that the RasPi graphics
processor will provide any additional kick to OpenCV. I'm pretty
confident that the ROS core will run on it with acceptable
performance. As long as ROS can be compiled for it, I'm happy.

Regards,

-Wayne

10/11/2012 08:24 AM, Osman Eralp wrote:
> It is true that the wifi stopped working on my PandaBoard. One day it
> was working, and the next day it wasn't. I didn't change anything. I put
> in an old SD card with a known good image and found the wifi didn't work
> with the that image too, so it looks like a hardware problem. I searched
> with Google to see if this is a common problem. It is not a common
> problem. Maybe Wayne and I have just been unlucky.
>
> My requirement for a mid-range processor board is that it must run
> OpenCV reasonably well. For me, "reasonably well" means tracking a
> colored object at 10 fps. If the PI can do that, I'm all in.
>
> I see my robot on-board processor options aligning like this:
>

> * For simple tasks, such as reading sensors, use a ARM Cortex Mx.
> * For behavior and simple computer vision tasks, use a Raspberry Pi.
> * For complex computer vision tasks, use an Atom or Core processor.

[Austin Hendrix]

I'm going to stick with my Pandaboard for the moment. I haven't had any
issues with the wireless yet, but I'll keep an eye on it.

I'm interested in sticking with the Pandaboard because it's
significantly faster and has more RAM than the other ARM boards
currently on the market, which means it has more potential to be able to
run the ROS navigation stack well, and more tolerance for running
unoptimized code.

The single thing that makes the Pandaboard difficult to work with is the
lack of precompiled binary packages for it, particularly ROS. I'm going
to keep pushing Tully (slowly; he's quite busy) to build packages for
it. I think this will be easier with the updates he's been making to the
build system.

-Austin

[David Murphy]

Most of my hopes are to run vision (ala openCV) on a low power ARM platform. This to me implies some heterogenous solution like openCL. I had hopes when the pandaboard became available that I might be able to get the openCL drivers which exist for the SGX core on the OMAP. But alas, it's not publicly available. 

Some time in the very near future tough, we should be able to get boards at a similar cost point to the panda that have Samsung's A15 + ARM's Mali 604 which will support openCL and I suspect the drivers will be readily available. And this trend should continue so that we will see parts in1-2 years that offer 100+Gflops via openCL on ARM platforms.

David

[Wayne C. Gramlich]

Austin:

You raise a valid point. Having a platform that can run ROS core
without running something as important as the ROS navigation stack
is pretty pointless.

-Wayne

On 10/11/2012 11:36 AM, Austin Hendrix wrote:
> I'm going to stick with my Pandaboard for the moment. I haven't had any
> issues with the wireless yet, but I'll keep an eye on it.
>
> I'm interested in sticking with the Pandaboard because it's
> significantly faster and has more RAM than the other ARM boards
> currently on the market, which means it has more potential to be able to
> run the ROS navigation stack well, and more tolerance for running
> unoptimized code.
>
> The single thing that makes the Pandaboard difficult to work with is the
> lack of precompiled binary packages for it, particularly ROS. I'm going
> to keep pushing Tully (slowly; he's quite busy) to build packages for
> it. I think this will be easier with the updates he's been making to the
> build system.

[snippage]

[Wayne C. Gramlich]

David:

I hear you. That is what I thought as well when we selected the
PandaBoard. It turns out that full support for the ARM architecture
was further over the horizon than I thought.

When it comes to OpenCV, I'm wondering whether the only platform
that is going to get full support in the near future is one of the
NVidia Tegra platforms since NVidia is actively supporting OpenCV.
If anybody has better visibility into OpenCV, I'd love to hear it.

Regards,

-Wayne

On 10/11/2012 07:52 PM, David Murphy wrote:
> Most of my hopes are to run vision (ala openCV) on a low power ARM
> platform. This to me implies some heterogenous solution like openCL. I
> had hopes when the pandaboard became available that I might be able to
> get the openCL drivers which exist for the SGX core on the OMAP. But
> alas, it's not publicly available.
>
> Some time in the very near future tough, we should be able to get boards
> at a similar cost point to the panda that have Samsung's A15 + ARM's
> Mali 604 which will support openCL and I suspect the drivers will be
> readily available. And this trend should continue so that we will see
> parts in1-2 years that offer 100+Gflops via openCL on ARM platforms.

[snippage]

[Bob Smith]

David Murphy wrote:
> Some time in the very near future tough, we should be able to get boards
> at a similar cost point to the panda that have Samsung's A15 + ARM's
> Mali 604 which will support openCL and I suspect the drivers will be
> readily available. And this trend should continue so that we will see
> parts in1-2 years that offer 100+Gflops via openCL on ARM platforms.

The Snowball from ST-Ericsson has pretty good
Linux support. The board is a little pricey
but includes WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, 9DOF IMU,
pressure sensor, and a console over USB serial.
My big complaint is that is does not have a
USB host port so you have to fool with OTG
cables.

http://www.igloocommunity.org/ for more info.
Arrow and Element14 stock them.


Bob

[David Murphy]

So, Samsung has announce their A15 board. The arndale board. You can see some details at

www.arndaleboard.org

This is samsung's attempt at a community board and software for it should be available soon.

As this board has a Mali T604, it does support openCL, but it is unclear to me when/if the openCL drivers with be available. But, being hopeful (as possibly foolish) I have ordered one. We'll see what happens.

anticipating,

David