Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
The LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 kit comes with a lot of Windows software to control
and program the brick, and there are some official (and unofficial) bindings for a wide
array of languages. The official Windows software will obviously not run on a Rasp-
berry Pi, but there is a software suite that does: ROS.
Installing ROS and Dependencies
ROS (short for robot operating system ) is an open source suite of software that pro-
vides libraries and tools to help software developers create robot-related applications,
including hardware abstraction, device drivers, libraries, visualizers, message-
passing, and package management. It was originally developed by the Stanford Arti-
ficial Intelligence Laboratory, but that work has spun off into a company called Willow
Garage, a robotics research institute and incubator. The goal is to provide a level of
open source standardization on the application programming interface (API) for ro-
botics so that a consistent set of software can be used on any type of robotic com-
ponent with minimal new software necessary and the common functionality shared.
This is a thriving effort with an active community that regularly puts out major, named
releases. We'll start by installing the current stable release, as of the time of this
writing: Groovy Galapagos ( Groovy , for short).
NXT Intelligent Brick Firmware
The ROS nxt component software requires the NXT Intelligent Brick to be running
a recent version of the default LEGO firmware (v1.28 or newer). To do this, you'll
need to have a Windows (or OS X) system with the LEGO Mindstorms software
installed and the NXT Intelligent Brick connected. Run the software, and go into
the Tools Update NXT Firmware menu option. You might need to download the
NXT firmware files manually.
There is also a way to flash the NXT firmware from Linux. Download and install
libnxt and use the fwflash executable.
Start with a clean installation of Raspbian.
There are two ways to install ROS: from prebuilt binary packages or from source. While
it is certainly possible to install ROS from source on a Raspberry Pi, it takes far too
long. Instead, using a community repository of ROS packages optimized for the Rasp-
berry Pi will significantly speed up the time it takes to install ROS. To enable this APT
repository of packages (called ROSpbian ), run:
$ sudo echo "deb http://64.91.227.57/repos/rospbian wheezy main" > /etc/apt/
sources.list.d/rospbian.list
Then add the package signing key (for package verification) and reload the apt pack-
age data:
 
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