Adding hardware to the Create3s

[halBRY]

The Create3s allow you to add other hardware, such as a Raspberry Pi, to bolster the roomba's abilities. See this guide.

We want to move in this direction. We can start with adding a Pi and, ideally, a 3D camera.

[halBRY]

We have a Luxonis DepthAI camera and the software to run it on the Raspberry Pi 2 see here

We need to figure out how connecting the Pi to the roomba works from here

We also need to test how the ROS2 camera packages work.

[halBRY]

Also Unity packages

[halBRY]

Flashing the Pi 5 with the Luxonis images isn't working, as they either get stuck in a boot loop, or don't show any display. We'll need to troubleshoot this.

The Luxonis software does work on the Pi 2, but Pi 5 is preferred, as it connects to the roombas easier

[halBRY]

Pi 5 with Raspberry Pi OS is functional. To avoid external environment errors, run pip with --break-system-packages flag

[halBRY]

We will need to follow this guide from iRobot to configure the Pi correctly to connect with the Create3.

[halBRY]

Awesome fun new problem: Running ROS2 Humble (and, by extent, Galactic) is not a trivial task on a Pi 5 due to OS version compatibilities.

In summary: ROS2 Humble wants Ubuntu 22/Debian 11. Pi 5 wants Ubuntu 23/Debian 12.

We should be able to run Humble in a Docker container on the Pi and proceed that way. I'm following these docs.

In this issue, a user indicates that Docker-Humble with the Create3 works, but is, and I quote, "not for the faint of heart".

[halBRY]

We've acquired a Pi 4 and flashed it with the proper version of Ubuntu to talk to the roomba. We just need to solidify the network configuration, then we should be able to mount the pi to the roomba.