Can we replace UPBoard with another SBC?

Hardware
1

Hi,

We have a number of ROSbot2 Pro, and would like to replace UPBoard with an ARM based SBC. I see that ROSbot 2R has RPi 4 SBC. Can we swap the UPboard with RPi 4? Do we need to replace firmware on the Core2 as well?
Secondly, can we use another more powerful SBC such as Rockpi 4C+?

Thank you for your guidance.

Best regards,
Jon.

2

Hello @Jon

I understand that you care about the native ROS 2 Humble issue? When it comes to many aspects, UP Board is considered a stronger SBC than Rpi 4B.
As for the second proposal and making such changes in general, unfortunately this is a procedure we do not support, and you would have to do it yourself with the help of materials available online (our documentation and open-source software on GitHub)

Best regards
Jan Brzyk

3

Hi Jan,

Thank you for your reply. Yes, this topic is related to to ROS Humble, but also related to long term support of ROSbot Pro within our organisation. The replacement of the SBC was identified as a possible option and so we want to explore it.
You are correct, RPi 4B is lower performance than UPBoard but for us to be able to continue to use ROSbot in future we must run Ubuntu 22.04 and higher on the SBC. UPBoard cannot offer this long term support.
Our options are:

  1. Replace with RPi 4 - Raspberry Pi has long term term support in Ubuntu kernel. Also, you Husarion already support RPi 4 in ROSbot 2R, so that perhaps we can downgrade our ROSbot Pro by using RPi 4 and update Core firmware. I think that only other difference is RPlidar A3 vs A2.
  2. Replace with another SBC with higher performance e.g. a RK3588 based SBC such as RockPi 5.
  3. Look for a different long term hardware/kernel support OS such as Armbian. However, UPBoard is not supported at the moment.

We accept that you cannot provide support on this, however, I raise this topic as this issue will apply to others owning ROSbot 2 Pro, who require up to date Linux build with kernel support for the existing or another SBC.

Thank you and kind regards,
Jon.

4

Hello @Jon,

I fully understand your need. In that case, I’m leaving this thread open so that you can share with the community what you’ve learned from a potential SBC trade.

Good luck!
Jan Brzyk

5

We replaced the Tinkerboards in eight Rosbot2’s with Odroid C4 sbc’s, which are similar to RPi 4B’s, but much more available right now. Once I got the firmware flashing working and got the microros firmware set up on the Core2 board, the Odroid worked fine. It used the serial port designation of the Tinkerboard rather than what the RPi uses. The biggest problem was getting the rest of the ros2 working on it, because the Husarion humble-ubuntu image file is incompatible with the Odroid and I had to figure out what I needed from the various docker files and install it on the Odroid ubuntu image.

– Ralph

1 Like
6

Hi,

Update regarding this topic. @ralphsterling solution for Odroid C4 is a good one and I am pleased they have it working. Hopefully, they can provide detailed instruction for other users to try.
For us, we have Rock4C+ SBC running Armbian 22.04 with ROS Humble on a ROSbot 2 Pro. We have not used Docker. We find Rock4C is higher performance than Pi4 but not as high as original UPBoard, but it is okay for us. Additionally, we replace the old Orbec Astra camera with OAK D-Lite which support ROS Humble much better.
Once we have performed further tests we may upgrade our 11 other ROSbots. For us, this is the only way to continue using ROSbot at our University for the reasons described at the beginning of this topic.

Best regards,
Jon.

7

@Jon

Thanks for sharing your findings on the forum!

Good luck with your next steps!

Best regards
Jan Brzyk