ROS 2 Iron or Humble on Beagle Bone Black

I am trying to install ROS 2 Iron or Humble on a BeagleBone Black. I know that Debian 11 Bullseye is the dominant OS, but for ROS 2 I am having difficulties installing it.

Is there a clear process for installing ROS 2 on Bullseye, or is it better to install Ubuntu 20.04 or 22.04?
I have also tried to get Ubuntu but have not had success.

Thank you

ROS is only Tier 1 supported on armhf with an Ubuntu base installs for the BeagleBone Black

Iā€™ve got weekly builds of 20.04 and 22.04 here, for your to play around with ros:

20.04: Index of /rootfs/ubuntu-armhf-20.04-console-v5.10-ti
22.04: Index of /rootfs/ubuntu-armhf-22.04-console-v5.10-ti

Regards,

1 Like

Hi Robert,

I found those images previously and tried to install both in a similar manner to how I installed Bullseye-- I used Rufus to put the image on a SD card. When I did this, the BBB didnt boot.

Is the process more complicated than installing the images found on the beaglebone distributions page?

Just use etcher.io or dd.

Thatā€™s great @RobertCNelson , I just installed 22.04 (5 Feb 25 image) on BBBlue (335) with no issues whatsoever! Thanks.

BTW, I still havenā€™t managed to get Ros going - neither Humble nor Iron - even following their site instructions verbatim (re repositories, etc), I get ā€œUnable to locate package ros-iron-ros-baseā€ or whatever. Iā€™ll try chase them up on Stack Exchange.

I donā€™t suppose anyone has actually managed to get Ros 2 up and running on a 335?

===

PS. Any view to a 24.04 (noble)?

Yup, thought that might be the case, Ros2 Humble has to be built from sourceā€¦

===

Canā€™t say I think much of this Ros approach of treating 32-bit systems as dead. Weā€™re talking about small SoCs here, not blooming supercomputers!

Itā€™s not ā€˜deadā€™, ROS2 just doesnā€™t provide any ā€˜buildā€™ resources for ā€˜arm32ā€™ any moreā€¦

Tier 3 [s]

  • Tier 3 platforms are those for which community reports indicate that the release is functional. The development team does not run the unit test suite or perform any other tests on platforms in Tier 3. Installation instructions should be available and up-to-date in order for a platform to be listed in this category. Community members may provide assistance with these platforms.

  • " [s] " Compilation from source.

Yeah for most users, this means itā€™s deadā€¦

Regards,

It looks like it is fully support with yocto layer.

It has 3 day old fresh commits.

Yeah, yocto/buildroot would be the best, as those build from source distrosā€¦ For ubuntu/debian, nope, to complex.

Well, thatā€™s encouraging; Iā€™ve been debating whether I should try building it or not.

My experience is limited, I donā€™t understand anything about that ā€œyoctoā€ stuff mentioned.

My approach would be to just build the thing in a normal 64-bit environment targetting the 32-bit arm. I hope Iā€™m not missing something serious. Are there other options?

You will need a decent metal box. 32gb ram, an NVMe with at least 500 Gb free and a not close to being maxed out. Its best to keep all the yocto builds on their own NVMe. Also move your swap to NVMe and set it to 60Gb. Tiā€™s latest 10.x bsp for the am335x will work fine. Also, you must use a ubuntu 22.04. If you want to try it and get stuck just ping me.

Thanks for the offer, really appreciated!
Unfortunately the stated hardware requirements exceed whatā€™s available by quite a bit.
(32 Gb RAM? NVMe? Where did we go so wrong? :grin:)

PS. OK, I read up a bit about it, for what it is thatā€™s not too bad at all, but certainly not your grandpaā€™s dev setupā€¦

@RobertCNelson

Itā€™s not ā€˜deadā€™, ROS2 just doesnā€™t provide any ā€˜buildā€™ resources for ā€˜arm32ā€™ any moreā€¦

Yeah, i know, Iā€™m being a snowflake, mea culpa.

However, there will be a fair amount of legacy users with 32-bit boxes, and for them from-source builds will probably be too much of an ask. Which - in practice, not in theory - makes support at Tier3 ā‰” zombie.