ROS on Raspberry Pi 3

This repository sets up a process to install ROS on a Raspberry Pi 3. Raspberry Pi 3 is a very low cost computer with a very large community. It makes it the ideal support to build a low cost robot. But there are lots of hardware issues (wifi drivers, opencv compatibility) which makes the "first robot code line" very late. The purpose of this repository is to get a very stable installation process to get the necessary libraries for ROS.

ROS is a very efficient programming framework but on the other side it can be very complicated leading to have compilation errors for packages you will never use... For instance, RVIZ is a package too much CPU demanding.

For the moment, only Jade distribution is managed. The Kinetic Distribution will be available directly from apt-get in few months. For information, this distribution deletes robot_model and robot_states_publisher which does not install on Raspberry Pi 3. For drone purpose it is not an issue. If you need these two packages, take care (and if you have the solution...)

The complete install on a new Raspberry Pi 3 takes approximately X hours.

First steps

Hardware

1 Raspberry Pi 3 Model B
1 Internet connection
1 USB smartphone charger (more than 2A)
1 MicroSD card with high performances if possible.

Flash the SDcard (for Windows users)

Download the Jessie Image for Raspberry Pi Not the "Lite" one
Download 7zip software
Download Win32diskImager
Unzip the Jessie image
Format the SD card
Open win32 disk image and flash the SD card with the Jessie Image
Once it is flashed (can take some minutes) Insert the SD card in the Raspberry Pi
Plug the Raspberry Pi 3 (Ethernet cable + power supply)

First boot

Connect via SSH on the Raspberry Pi
login : pi; password : raspberry
Execute : sudo raspi-config
Expand file system
autologin after boot in console mode
wait for connection before login
enable camera
exit (and reboot)
Execute : sudo nano /etc/dphys-swapfile
replace CONF_SWAPSIZE=100 by CONF_SWAPSIZE=1024
Execute : sudo reboot

Install ROS