Getting started

The first steps will be to install the operating system on the onboard computer and flash the right firmware to the Arduino microcontroller.

Intel UpBoard

The first step will be to flash the UpBoard with an image of the Ubuntu operating system.

https://up-board.org/up/specifications/

The UpBoard has several USB 2.0 ports where you can plug in your keyboard and your USB flash stick with the iso of the OS, and an HDMI port to connect your monitor. You should install Ubuntu 20.04 and the set up the ROS environment —Noetic— on the UpBoard.

Arduino

Assign a permanent descriptor to the Arduino board (see this link) on the UpBoard computer, so that it can always be accessed the same way:

$ cat /etc/udev/rules.d/52-arduino.rules
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", KERNEL=="ttyUSB[0-9]*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="1a86", ATTRS{idProduct}=="7523", SYMLINK+="arduino", GROUP="plugdev"

You need to find you idVendor and idProduct. Run the following command on a terminal:

$ lsusb -v

You will get something like this:

Bus 001 Device 007: ID 1a86:7523 QinHeng Electronics HL-340 USB-Serial adapter
Couldn't open device, some information will be missing
Device Descriptor:
  bLength                18
  bDescriptorType         1
  bcdUSB               1.10
  bDeviceClass          255 Vendor Specific Class
  bDeviceSubClass         0 
  bDeviceProtocol         0 
  bMaxPacketSize0         8
  idVendor           0x1a86 QinHeng Electronics
  idProduct          0x7523 HL-340 USB-Serial adapter

Firmware

You will need to flash a new firmware for the Arduino board. To to this, checkout this github repository. Then, using the Arduino IDE, connect your computer to the Arduino board using an USB cable. Open the sketch called Firmware_for_AurigaUpBoard in the examples folder. The Arduino IDE should already have selected the right port and version of the board. Flash it.

There is plenty of documentation online if you encounter any problems.

Rplidar A1

As with the Arduino we will set up a permanent descriptor for the Lidar. The rplidar_ros package comes already with a script to do so:

~ws/src/rplidar_ros/scripts$ sudo bash create_udev_rules.sh