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Raspberry Pi image with ROS 2 and the real-time kernel

Build image

This repo builds a Raspberry Pi 4 image with ROS 2 and the real-time kernel pre-installed. This image can be downloaded directly from the releases page, flashed to a SD card, and booted on a Raspberry Pi 4.

How to

Before you start, you need an SD card that is at least 8GB in size.

  1. Download the desired image from the releases page.
  2. The image is compressed with the xz compression format. You will need to decompress it. On Windows, try using 7-zip to do this if your file archiver doesn't decompress this format already. Once decompressed, you should have a file that ends with the extension .img.
    1. On Mac/GNU-Linux, use xz --decompress file.img.xz in the command line.
  3. The easiest way to flash the image is via the Raspberry Pi imager.
    1. Using the Raspberry Pi Image, click CHOOSE OS.
    2. Scroll all the way down and click Use custom.
    3. Browse and select the image file.
    4. Select the storage device.
    5. Click Write to flash the image.
    6. Wait for it to be done.
  4. Unplug the SD card and plug it into the Raspberry Pi 4. Turn on the Raspberry Pi.
  5. The default username is ubuntu and the password is ubuntu. The default hostname is ubuntu. You can login either directly on the Raspberry Pi or via SSH (enabled by default). You'll need to change your password the first time you login.
  6. To save space, the image does not have the desktop environment installed. If you want a desktop environment, you must install it with the following three commands:
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install ubuntu-desktop
sudo apt install ros-humble-desktop
  1. You can now use ROS 2. To confirm, type ros2 into the terminal. You should see:
usage: ros2 [-h] [--use-python-default-buffering] Call `ros2 <command> -h` for more detailed usage. ...

ros2 is an extensible command-line tool for ROS 2.

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit

  [...omitted for brevity]
  1. The setup is now complete! You can follow the rest of the ROS 2 tutorials here.

Bonus setup

  • Setup WiFi without a GUI.
  • Overclocking the CPU. I've had good luck with arm_freq=2000 and over_voltage=6 when using power supplies that can consistently output 5V/3A (like the official power supply).
  • Try out real-time programming with the following resources:

The rest of this README is meant for developers who want to know more about the image builder.

Custom Image Builder for the Raspberry Pi for ROS 2 + PREEMPT_RT

This is a custom image builder for the Raspberry Pi 4. Some features:

  • Customize the official Ubuntu server image for the Raspberry Pi by mounting it locally (via loop device) and chrooting into it (via systemd-nspawn and qemu-user-static).
    • I can't locate how Canonical generate the official Ubuntu images for the Raspberry Pi, so I had to resort to this method.
    • The default customization in this repo is made for ROS2 with PREEMPT_RT applied.
  • With two stages of setup scripts, executing in lock step both inside and outside the chroot, we can cross compile code (via something like CMake toolchain) on the host and copy it into the chroot for making the final image.
  • One thing we all hate while building images is to waste a lot of time. These scripts are designed to hopefully not waste your time. It has several features for this:
    • The build process is divided into resumable steps. This means there is no need (in most cases) to restart the build from scratch if you make a mistake. You can experiment with the image as it builds either by deliberately pausing the build process after a certain step or be forced to pause because there are some typos in the build scripts.
    • Nice logs that aids with debugging of the build, should things go wrong.
    • Use tools like pv to display progress when applicable.
  • The features of the actual RT image is difficult to document without becoming out of date quickly. Please take a look at focal-rt-ros2/ros2/rootfs/setup/phase1.sh for the setup script that runs against the Ubuntu image and focal-rt-ros2/rootfs for files that gets overlaid on top of the Ubuntu image. That said, some basics are:
    • Installed PREEMPT_RT kernel.
    • Pinned CPU frequency and performance governor.
    • Removed some unnecessary services like snapd and fwupd to save resources.
    • Installed ROS2 galactic from apt.
    • Installed some misc. tooling (like vcgencmd).

Todos

  • Optionally configure isolcpus and nohz_full for the kernel.
  • Use a sha256 checksum to ensure downloaded image and kernel are "secure".
  • Add overclocking support

How to use

System requirements

Why not docker? Unfortunately, the current setup doesn't work in Docker, as I used systemd-nspawn to make setting up and executing commands in a chroot easier (mainly so I can save some time figuring out the various bind mounts I need, to shutdown the container correctly if a command fails, and to force quit a container if something goes really wrong by pressing ^] 3 times). This tool also rely on loop devices, which are not namespaced and thus not readily usable in Docker without privileged access. It may be possible to use Docker later by changing this code, but for now it's not possible (the code will also likely be uglier as nspawn can't be easily used in docker?).

Thus, you'll need a Linux machine with root and the following tools installed: cut, grep, parted, pv, rsync, truncate, wget, systemd-nspawn, and qemu-aarch64-static.

You will also need python3.

To build the focal-rt-ros2 image, you'll also need: zip.

For Ubuntu, you can simply run:

$ sudo apt install parted pv rsync wget systemd-container qemu-user-static make zip

To run

  1. Build the image
  • To build the Ubuntu 22.04 + ROS Humble image: make jammy-rt-ros2.
  • To build the Ubuntu 20.04 + ROS Galactic image: make focal-rt-ros2.
  1. Take the image in the out folder and dd it into an SD card (or flash it in another way).

Cross compilation

There are two ways to use cross-compilation with this system:

  1. In the image build process, cross-compile and install some applications (phase2 cross-compile). See the customization guide for more details.
  2. After the image is built, re-mount it and then cross-compile other projects in an adhoc/interactive manner (interactive cross-compile). This section talks about this use case.

To cross-compile, you'll need to install this builder on the host machine via setuptools:

[host]$ sudo python3 setup.py install

Make sure the built image is mounted by running the following command in the same directory where you built the image. This will also create a file called cache/loop-device.txt that records which loop device is used to mount the image.

[host]$ sudo ros-rt-img mount out/ubuntu-22.04.1-rt-ros2-arm64+raspi.img

This will mount the image at /tmp/rpi4-image-build. At this point, you might need to install dependencies into this image before you can build and link your application. To do this, first enter the container:

[host]$ sudo ros-rt-img chroot

Then install any dependencies you want:

[rpi4image]# sudo apt install libboost-dev # An example

Note, this changes the built img file. So either you want to create a backup if you want the pristine copy (or alternatively, use the phase2 cross-compile instead).

This project provides a cmake toolchain file and its absolute is printed when you run the command ros-rt-img toolchain. To use this file with cmake, make sure you have the cross-compiler installed on your host machine, then configure your project and build via the following commands:

[host]$ sudo apt install gcc-aarch64-linux-gnu g++-aarch64-linux-gnu
[host]$ cd <project path>
[host]$ cmake -Bbuild -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=$(ros-rt-img toolchain)
[host]$ cmake --build build -j $(nproc)

The targets built can then be copied to the Raspberry Pi (via SSH, or other means), where it can then run.

To unmount the img, run the following command in the same directory where you mounted it originally (where it originally created the cache/loop-device.txt file):

$ sudo ros-rt-img umount

Customization guide

See docs/BuilderDesignAndUsageGuide.md.