P3

Reason for upgrade:

After a quick review of the current state of the bot it was found that the software was very old – this includes both the kernel (2.2.xx) and for example the gcc compiler and its associated libraries. There was also an issue in getting the firewire board to work properly.

As a solution it seemed reasonable to upgrade the software on the P3 – one immediate benefit would be a newer kernel which would provide more robust support for hardware including the firewire board and associated firewire devices. Another benefit would be an all around upgrade of the software (both OS as well as software from mobile robots) on the controller, a better configured disk setup, a fix on the now non-function power management (the robot was not shutting down cleanly on low battery power), and best of all the ability to compile apps on a similar install elsewhere and port them to the robot later.

Backup:

Seeing as we had no previous documentation on anyone else doing this we decided to play it safe. So step one was to preserve the current install. To be on the safe side we used 'dd' to make a bit copy of the robot disk and place it on the workstation as follows:

• Open the robot and connect a USB IDE adapter to the robot disk

• Connected the USB adapter to the lab workstation and mounted the disk as '/dev/sdb*'

• Using 'dd' the drive was backed up; 'dd if=/dev/sdb of=/home/robot conv=sync,noerror'

  • Using default block size which is '512'

In retrospect, we could have run 'zerofree' to mark non-used blocks on the disk and then done some nifty compression of the image.

Restore:

This was actually done after we had finished installing the new OS but its here to keep a link between the backup. To test if our image was successfully copied we used a blank disk and copied the 'dd' file back as follows:

• Connect blank disk to USB IDE adapter

• Using 'sdd' the image was copied back: 'dd if=/home/robot of=/dev/sda -noerror -pg'

  • We introduced 'sdd' which behaves exactly like 'dd' but has the option '-pg' which provides an output on the screen to let you know that process is running. Useful, since this is a bit of time consuming operation

• The blank disk was connected to the robot and the robot was then booted up. This operation was successful and various function on the robot were tested like network connectivity, wheel motion, etc.

So now we had a good backup we were ready to proceed

File Backup:

In addition to the 'dd' backup, we needed a way to get information from configuration files while installing the new OS. Since space was not an issue on the workstation a folder was created under '/home/Robot' and following partitions were mounted and copied:

• Partitions mounted:

  • /dev/sdb3 on /media/-home type ext3 (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,sync,data=ordered)

  • /dev/sdb2 on /media/-usr type ext3 (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,sync,data=ordered)

  • /dev/sdb5 on /media/disk type ext3 (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,sync,data=ordered)

  • /dev/sdb7 on /media/-tmp type ext3 (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,sync,data=ordered)

  • /dev/sdb6 on /media/-var type ext3 (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,sync,data=ordered)

  • /dev/sdb1 on /media/-boot type ext2 (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,sync)

• Backup:

  • cp -rp /media/-home/* /home/Robot/home/

  • cp -rp /media/-usr/* /home/Robot/usr/

  • cp -rp /media/disk/* /home/Robot/disk/

  • cp -rp /media/-tmp/* /home/Robot/tmp/

  • cp -rp /media/-var/* /home/Robot/var/

  • cp -rp /media/-boot/* /home/Robot/boot/

Install:

• The following software packages are needed by the robot, the newest versions were downloaded and saved under /home/Robot/SW:

  • arcos – ver 2.2

  • aria – ver 2.5-1 – note dependency files in Aria download folder (python and java)

  • arnl - libarnl_1.5.1_i386.deb

  • sonarnl - libsonarnl_1.5.1_i386.deb

  • biclops

  • mobile sim - mobilesim_0.4.0_i386.deb

  • mobile eyes - mobileeyes_1.4.14-2_i386.deb

  • mapper 3 - mapper3_1.3.10-2_i386.deb

  • mapper 3 basic – mapper3-basic_1.3.10-2_i386.deb

• Using debian net install disk – version 4.0 (debian etch)

• A CD-ROM drive was connected to the IDE 2 controller. This motherboard does not support cable select so all drives need to be clearly set as master or slave. In this case there were only two drives, one on each controller, so they were both master.

  • The drive setting in basic CMOS settings: IDE 2 to CD (IDE 0 remains the harddisk, 1 and 3 are empty)

• The vesalogic board only uses “El torrito” boot and so cannot boot from CD without some emulation. So software downloaded from vesalogic and was put under “/home/Robot/SW/Motherboard” and a boot disk was setup:

  • dd if=sbm.bin of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k

  • A floppy disk was connected to the motherboard

• Changed Boot order in basic CMOS settings (1 floppy, 2 CDROM, 3 Drive C)

• Cisco Aironet 350

  • The installer automatically picked up the PCMCIA board and the PCMCIA Cisco AeroNet^? wireless card. The card was configured to connect to the lab wireless

• Network configurations:

  • hostname = “rambot2”

  • domain = “cis.fordham.edu”

• • Network nics discovered:

    • eth0 – firewire

    • eth1 eepro 100

    • eth2 wifi

    • wifi0 – proabably wifi – hal aliases this to eth2

  • eth0 configuration:

    • Static

    • IP 150.108.68.201

    • Netmask 255.255.255.0

    • Route 150.108.68.1

    • DNS 150.108.2.11 150.108.4.11

  • eth1 – wireless configuration:

    • essid: “visionrobot”

    • dhcp

    • no encryption

• Disk partitions on 40GB disk:

  PART

  SIZE (GB)

  Loc

  P/S

  /

  4

  /dev/hda1

  P

  /usr

  6

  /dev/hda2

  P

  /var

  4

  /dev/hda3

  P

  /home

  24

  /dev/hda4

  P

• Swapfiles:

  • 4 x 1024 swapfiles named swap0 – 4 located under /home/swaps/swap0 – 4

• apt sources were updated to 'testing' and 'non-free' and 'contrib' were added. A system update was performed

• powergend

  • Pending – this was not working on the old install – so it can be fixed a little slower

Wireless Issue:

After the debian install, the wireless card and the PCMCIA bus did not load, meaning that not all the drivers necessary were being loaded. The following modules in bold are needed but are not being loaded so those needed to be added:

~$: lsmod

airo_cs 1

airo airo_cs

e100

mii

nls_iso8859_1

eth1394

pcmcia

firmware_class

i82365

rsrc_nonstatic i82365

*pcmcia_core airo_cs, pcmcia, i82365,rsrc_nonstatic*

isofs

sbp2

ieee1394 eth1394,ohci1394,sbp2

usbcore

Swaps:

Including a swap file (instead of a swap partition):

Determine the size of the new swap file and multiple by 1024 to determine the block size. For example, the block size of a 256 MB swap file is 262144.

At a shell prompt as root, type the following command with count being equal to the desired block size:

 =dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/swap0 bs=1024 count=262144= 

Setup the swap file with the command:

 =mkswap /swap0= 

To enable the swap file immediately but not automatically at boot time:

 =swapon /swapfile= 

To enable it at boot time, edit /etc/fstab to include:

 =/swapfile               swap                    swap    defaults        0 0= 

Software:

Package Installations (src downloaded to /home/Robot/SW/:

• Aria

  • libaria_2.5.1_i386.deb – no problems

  • libaria-python_2.5.1_i386.deb

    • dependency python2.4

• Biclops (libBiclops downloaded from svn @ https://www.traclabs.com/svn/Biclops/)

  • requires make, g++,

  • requires libs

    • libPMD downloaded from Traclabs svn repository (https://www.traclabs.com/svn/motion/)

    • libUtils downloaded from the source above

• Not needed because they are for laser mapping systems and we do not have one

  • libarnl_1.5.1_i386.deb

  • mapper3_1.3.10-2_i386.deb

• libsonarnl_1.5.1_i386.deb

  • installed

• mapper3-basic_1.3.10-2_i386.deb

  • installed

• Mobileeyes

  • mobileeyes depends on libfontconfig1 (>= 2.2.1)

  • mobileeyes depends on libfreetype6 (>= 2.1.5-1)

  • mobileeyes depends on libice6 | xlibs (>> 4.1.0)

  • mobileeyes depends on libsm6 | xlibs (>> 4.1.0)

  • mobileeyes depends on libstdc++5 (>= 1:3.3.4-1)

  • mobileeyes depends on libx11-6 | xlibs (>> 4.1.0)

  • mobileeyes depends on libxcursor1 (>> 1.1.2)

  • mobileeyes depends on libxext6 | xlibs (>> 4.1.0)

  • mobileeyes depends on libxft2 (>> 2.1.1)

  • mobileeyes depends on libxrandr2 | xlibs (>> 4.3.0)

  • mobileeyes depends on libxrender1

• Mobilesim

  • mobilesim depends on libatk1.0-0 (>= 1.7.2)

  • mobilesim depends on libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.4.7)

  • mobilesim depends on libgtk2.0-0 (>= 2.4.4)

  • mobilesim depends on libpango1.0-0 (>= 1.6.0)

Biclops stuff:

BiclopsBareBones^?.mak Biclops.cpp libBiclops.dsp libBiclops.mak Makefile

make libUtils with no problems libUtils/src

make libPMD with no problems libPMD/src

make - /home/bot/Desktop/libBiclops/src/

make BiclopsBareBones^? - /home/bot/Desktop/libBiclops/src/

sudo cp libBiclops.so /usr/lib

sudo cp lib/libPMD.so /usr/lib

sudo cp libUtils.so /usr/lib

then run program and it works

todo:

• find script to signal complete start-up and halt with beeps

• aria java

• power management – powergend

-- AlexDorey - 17 Mar 2008