Raspberry Pi 2: ROSBerryPi vs UbuntuARM

Question

I just got a Raspberry Pi 2 for my birthday. I have a current robot project involving a Wild Thumper chassis and recently asked a question here regarding installing ROS on a Radxa Rock Pro.

Unfortunately, my Radxa board is experiencing some network problems (i.e. no network), and because I have limited time before the next semester in college begins, and of course, because I got this new Raspberry Pi model 2, I've decided instead to use it for the robot and for running ROS.

I've been doing initial research, reading through questions & answers here, as well as in the wiki. It's my current understanding that the two most popular ways for running ROS on a Raspberry Pi 2 include

1. UbuntuARM
2. ROSBerryPi

Both appear to be quite popular and well-documented. Can anyone advise me as to which is better, if there is such a qualitative distinction between the two methods?

What are the pros and cons of using each?

I know Raspbian is the official Raspberry Pi distro and is designed to work best with the Pi, but Ubuntu is the official ROS distro, and the UbuntuARM method has been around longer (please correct me if I'm mistaken). Also, again if I'm not mistaken, the ROSBerryPi method requires installing from source, right?

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Originally posted by tommytwoeyes on ROS Answers with karma: 57 on 2015-12-20

Post score: 1

Answer 1

If you need to use the gpio on the raspberry pi then there is more documentation and examples of doing that using raspbian, the tradeoff is you have to build ROS rather than installing packages.

Installing Ubuntu makes the install of ROS easier, but getting at gpio harder.

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Originally posted by nickw with karma: 1504 on 2015-12-21

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 0

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Original comments

Comment by tommytwoeyes on 2015-12-21:
I asked about differences in the tutorials for Raspberry Pi Model B+ vs Raspberry Pi 2 on the Adafruit forums, and one of their support guys said that the Model 2 is now using Device Tree Overlays. Wouldn't this make GPIO access easier, regardless of OS?

Comment by nickw on 2015-12-21:
should do, but the its still pretty fiddly for now https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/device-tree.md - if you use raspbian there are multiple libraries, latest release has access without sudo enabled by default making it much easier to make ROS nodes that use gpio directly

Answer 2

Ubuntu ARM worked better for me (I tried both). There we're compile problems related to PCL with ROSBerryPi (because if can't find 'flann', then flann won't build, etc). Currently running ROS Navigation (works quite well), and experimenting with frontier_exploration on the Pi2.

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Originally posted by jordan with karma: 125 on 2015-12-22

This answer was NOT ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1