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This is the page on how to install a specialized version of ROS for running the Kinect on the gumstix overo. The gumstix overo can read frames at full framerate from the kinect on both RGB and Depth, but it can't publish at full speed.

Installation

The Overo comes with an SD card. Use DD to install the correct image to the SD card. The disk image is available here (note: it's 5.1GB).

Booting

Unplug the Overo and plug in the properly formated SD Card. If you know the IP of the device, use ping to ping the IP until it boots.

If you do not know the IP of the device, use serial to connect to the device. To do this, you must connect from your computer to the device over USB to serial. First, plug the device's USB port into your computer. Second, make sure the port is plugged in by doing:

ls -l /dev/ttyUSB0

Assuming that there are no other USB to serial devices plugged in. You may have to do a chmod on the device in order to access it.

Third, you must install kermit.

sudo apt-get install kermit

Add the following lines to ~/.mykermrc:

set line /dev/ttyUSB0
set flow-control none
set carrier-watch off
set speed 115200
connect

Run kermit by simply typing kermit. This should automatically connect to the device. You should see some response when typing any text and a newline. Log in to the bash shell, and type "ifconfig". You should now be able to find the IP of the device. Note: we don't recommend using the serial interface because it is very slow and prone to error.

SSH Access

You can SSH into the device using the username "ros" with the password "willow" at the given IP from the previous step.

Running the Device

First, if you plan on using the device for sending ROS messages over network, you must properly configure your ROS_IP and ROS_MASTER_URI environment variables.

Now, you can run the following command to start the driver:

roslaunch openni_camera_unstable openni_clean.launch 

Overview of SD Card Creation

The first step was to install graphicsless Linaro Linux on the SD Card. Once that was done, rosinstall was used to download all the dependencies of openni_camera in diamondback. Next, the ROS_OS_OVERRIDE variable was set to Ubuntu, so that all the system dependencies could be installed. All dependencies except ps-engine and openni-dev were installed manually. apt-get clean was used to save disk space. Openni-dev and ps-engine had to built by downloading the drivers from the ROS Kinect page. Patches had to be applied to remove -msse and -malign-double (see tickets). Next, we had to manually install OpenCV because the newest version has not been released for arm. This also meant removing rosdep tags from manifests. Finally, we had to apply the patches to remove X windows dependencies and rosmake openni_camera_unstable.

Tickets

The following tickets were created as a result of this project:


2024-04-20 12:39