IFC6410 + Turtlebot = Tour Guide

[Taylor Peterson]

Hello all,

We (a team of Harvey Mudd students) are working on a senior design project sponsored by Qualcomm. Specifically, we're developing a tour-guide robot using ROS, the IFC6410, and a TurtleBot2. 

Have any of you tried anything similar to this? If so, any pointers/warnings would be much appreciated! Also, has anyone gotten Kinect working on ARM/IFC6410 using libfreenect?

We'll be posting more details (including steps to reproduce our work) when the project wraps up in late April.

[Austin Hendrix]

The kinect works reasonably well on the IFC6410 using both the libfreenect and openni.

There are a few gotchas when working with the IFC6410 board:

 * The internal disk is 4G, of which only 2GB is usable. (all of my attempts to modify the partition table have rendered my board unbootable, despite the fact that I haven't modified any of the partitions that are documented as being critical to the boot process).
 * The microSD card doesn't work properly in later versions of the linaro images. Use the 14.05 image.
 * Even when moving /opt and the user's home directory to the microSD card, there's still barely enough room on the internal disk to install the dependencies that ROS requires. be prepared to spend some time uninstalling packages that you aren't using.

Tully and I have been working on an IFC6410 guide: https://github.com/tfoote/ros_ifc6410_guide . It isn't finished, but it should be better than starting from scratch.

-Austin

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[Andrew Michaud]

Sorry for the horrendous delay in responding.

 * We're currently on 14.04, which mostly worked except apparently not having drivers for the Turtlebot platform.  We're currently trying to upgrade to 14.05.
 * We got around the storage restriction in a somewhat sketchy way.  We moved all of /opt, /var, and /usr to the SD card, providing enough space for all of the ROS packages.
   Unfortunately, there's no way (as far as I could tell) to put the board in Linux single user mode, so there was no safe way to do this. What I did was:
    * Format SD card as ext4 or other reasonable format.
    * Mount at /mnt/flash or similar.
    * Create opt, var, and usr directories on the flash drive.
    * Copy /opt, /var, and /usr to the flash drive (using "cp -ax /usr/* /mnt/flash/usr/" for each directory).  You're not supposed to do this while processes are running, but it worked for me.  Use at your own risk.
    * Add entry to /etc/fstab so the SD card is mounted at boot ( I used the line "/dev/mmcblk1p1 /mnt/flash ext4 defaults 0 0".  Make sure you replace /dev/mmcblk1p1 with wherever your SD card is and replace /mnt/flash with your choice of location.)
    * Add bind mount entries to /etc/fstab so that you use the SD card directories over the directories in the system memory.  Use these:
      "/mnt/flash/var /var none bind 0 0"
      "/mnt/flash/usr /usr none bind 0 0"
      "/mnt/flash/opt /opt none bind 0 0"
    * Reboot.  If the board seems to work, you should be able to install whatever you like and it will go to the SD card instead of the system memory.  I haven't had any space issues.
This isn't really a safe procedure and I can't really provide any guarantees about it, but it's worked on a couple of the boards we have and nothing seems wrong.

We've gotten a lot of help from our Qualcomm liaisons, but we'll definitely keep that guide in mind.  We'll try to contribute back what we've discovered at the end of our project (~May or so).

- Andrew

[Kaijen Hsiao]

We're using InForce's newest 14.10 version (the one from InForce's TechWeb, NOT the one from the releases.linaro.org page, which hasn't been updated), which has the MicroSD card working properly finally.  It's worked well for us with the Kobuki base, once you add the appropriate kernel module.  You can see our detailed instructions on how to get it to work (along with a link to the compiled kernel module for Kobuki serial) here:

https://github.com/ixirobot/embedded/wiki/InForce-IFC6410-ROS-installation-instructions

-Kaijen

[Hai Nguyen]

If it's not too late. I'd recommend getting one of the Odroid boards. IFC6410 is much more of a pain to get working and its connectors are all randomly flakey.

[Kristof Robot]

Or the Raspberry Pi 2 :)

http://www.raspberrypi.org/raspberry-pi-2-on-sale/

- A 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU (~6x performance)
- 1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM (2x memory)
- Complete compatibility with Raspberry Pi 1

Price: $35

Kristof

[Sundeep Rau]

Yes, Inforce's newest 14.10 version also has MIPI-CSI frame capture apart from MicroSD fix. 

Nguyen, what issues did you face with the connectors?

[Hai Nguyen]

I remember the micro-HDMI and SD card slot not being particular secure; a slight wiggle would take out my video. And  to put the board into fast boot you have to connect two random pins on this large row of pins together, which would be fine I guess if we didn't have to reset it so many times when the inevitable screw up happens in moving /opt, /var, etc.

On the Odroids, in contrast, you flash a memory card and shove it in and the thing works. It even comes with a nice case instead of the Inforce's little sad piece of acrylic.

Hai Nguyen

http://haidai.tumblr.com