Odroid-XU4 and Raspberry Pi2 are single board computers which have a low form factor the size of a credit card. These single board computers can be installed in robots and we can install ROS on them.
The main specifications comparison of Odroid-XU4 and Raspberry Pi2 is shown next:
|
Device |
Odroid-XU4 |
Raspberry Pi 2 |
|
CPU |
2.0 GHz Quad core ARM Cortex-A15 CPU from Samsung |
900 MHz quad core ARM Cortex A7 CPU from Broadcom |
|
GPU |
Mali-T628 MP6 GPU |
VideoCore IV |
|
Memory |
2 GB |
1 GB |
|
Storage |
SD card slot or eMMC module |
SD card slot |
|
Connectivity |
2 x USB 3.0, 1 x USB 2.0, micro HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet |
4 x USB, HDMI, Ethernet, 3.5 mm audio jack |
|
OS |
Android, Ubuntu/Linux |
Raspbian, Ubuntu/Linux, Windows 10 |
|
Connectors |
GPIO, SPI, I2C, RTC (Real Time Clock) backup battery connector |
Camera interface (CSI), GPIO, SPI, I2C, JTAG |
|
Price |
$59 |
$35 |
The following is an image of the Odroid-XU4 board:
The Odroid board is manufactured by a company called Hard Kernel. The official web page of the Odroid-XU4 board is at http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G143452239825.
Odroid-XU4 is the most powerful board of the Odroid family. There are cheaper and lower performance boards as well, such as Odroid-C1+ and C2. All these boards support ROS. One of the popular single board computers is Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi boards are manufactured by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which is based in the UK (visit https://www.raspberrypi.org).
The following is an image of the Raspberry Pi 2 board:
We can install Ubuntu and Android on Odroid. There are also unofficial distributions of Linux, such as Debian mini, Kali Linux, Arch Linux, and Fedora, and support libraries, such as ROS, OpenCV, PCL, and so on. For getting ROS on Odroid, we can either install a fresh Ubuntu and install ROS manually like a standard desktop PC, or directly download the unofficial Ubuntu distribution for Odroid with ROS already installed.
The image for Ubuntu 16.04 for Odroid boards can be downloaded from http://de.eu.odroid.in/ubuntu_16.04lts/ . You can download the desired kernel version for the Odroid-XU4 board (for example, ubuntu-16.04-mate-odroid-xu4-20170731.img.xz). This file contains pre-installed images of Ubuntu.
The list of the other operating systems supported on Odroid-XU4 is given on the wiki page at http://odroid.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=en:odroid-xu4, while the Raspberry Pi 2 official OS images are given at https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/.
The official OSes supported by the Raspberry Pi Foundation are Raspbian and Ubuntu. There are unofficial images based on these OSes which have ROS pre-installed on them. In this book, we are using the Raspbian Jessie images (https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/) with ROS installed, following the ROS wiki page for the installation: http://wiki.ros.org/ROSberryPi/Installing%20ROS%20Kinetic%20on%20the%20Raspberry%20Pi.