Thanks to the help of the folks on this board, especially Robert:
Part 1 - history as regular user on Unix host machine - In my case a old AMD-64 laptop running Ubuntu 12.04 -
the 8 gig SD card had previous been formatted to a boot and regular partition, but the script run from this
distribution will repartition and completely reformat the sd-card.
1937 wget https://rcn-ee.net/deb/rootfs/trusty/ubuntu-14.04-console-armhf-2014-08-13.tar.xz
1938 md5sum ubuntu-14.04-console-armhf-2014-08-13.tar.xz
1939 029df8a9afe211516b1e2ed9f4897b40 ubuntu-14.04-console-armhf-2014-08-13.tar.xz
1940 md5sum ubuntu-14.04-console-armhf-2014-08-13.tar.xz
029df8a9afe211516b1e2ed9f4897b40
1942 tar xf ubuntu-14.04-console-armhf-2014-08-13.tar.xz
1943 ls
1944 rm tar
1945 ls
1946 cd ubuntu-14.04-console-armhf-2014-08-13/
1947 ls
1948 sudo ./setup_sdcard.sh --probe-mmc
1949 sudo ./setup_sdcard.sh --mmc /dev/sdb --dtb beaglebone
my card mounted as sdb yours might be different.
Pop the sd card out and then pop it back in.
sync
Rename the boot file so the card will boot to ubuntu, not the flash on the BBB.
mv /media/BOOT/bbb-uEnv.txt uEnv.txt
remove from laptop or host pc - insert in BBB logon ubuntu - temppwd
PART 2
Connect bbb to an ehernet router and use shh from another machine to log in.
edit /etc/apt/sources.list uncomment (edit out the # in front of debs for the alternates (there are two)
sudo apt-get update
go to http://wiki.ros.org/indigo/Installation/UbuntuARM I followed the instruction there.
after base install and rosdep - roscd worked
navigation stack said base would add 571MB
The following packages will be upgraded:
libdbus-1-3
1 upgraded, 298 newly installed, 0 to remove and 18 not upgraded.
Need to get 138 MB of archives.
After this operation, 571 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Here is the history on the BBB:
1 cd /etc/apt
2 ls
3 vi sources.list (edit the debs_
4 sudo apt-get update
5 sudo sh -c ‘echo “deb http://packages.namniart.com/repos/ros trusty main” > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list’
6 wget http://packages.namniart.com/repos/namniart.key -O - | sudo apt-key add -
7 sudo apt-get update
8 sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-ros-base (took about 45m)
9 date (I needed to reset because the BBB didn’t have the correct time, and I was getting warnings - but this isn’t crtical)
10 cat /etc/os-release (check per instructions)
11 sudo apt-get install python-rosdep
12 sudo rosdep init
13 rosdep update
14 echo “source /opt/ros/indigo/setup.bash” >> ~/.bashrc
15 source ~/.bashrc
16 roscd
17 sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-navigation
18 sudo apt-get install python-rosinstall
19 history
Test to see if roxcore and roscd work.
After that I created the catkin_ws, added ROS_ARDUINO_BRIDGE - and got that up and running.
mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src
cd ~/catkin_ws/src
catkin_init_workspace
cd …
catkin_make
(edit ./bashrc so last line is source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash
then make sure you source ~/.bashrc
cd /catkin_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/hbrobotics/ros_arduino_bridge.git
cd …
catkin_make (takes about 5 minutes)
cd src/ros_arduino_bridge
(there is a README.md file there that has further instructions.
In brief,
sudo apt-get install python-serial
sudo usermod -a -G dialout “Your_user_name”
cd ros_arduino_pyhton/config
cp arduino_params.yaml my_arduino_params.yaml
edit my_arduino_params.yaml
and change ttyACM0 to ttyUSB0
roslaunch ros_arduino_python arduino.launch
should run, assuming you have an arduino with the sketch loaded.