Odroid-C1 and Raspberry Pi2 are single board computers which have low form factor with a size of a credit card. These single board computers can be installed in robots and we can install ROS on it.
The main specifications comparison of Odroid-C1 and Raspberry Pi2 is shown next:
|
Device |
Odroid-C1 |
Raspberry Pi 2 |
|
CPU |
1.5 GHz quad core ARM Cortex-A5 CPU from Amlogic |
900 MHz quad core ARM Cortex A7 CPU from Broadcom |
|
GPU |
Mali-450 MP2 GPU |
VideoCore IV |
|
Memory |
1 GB |
1 GB |
|
Storage |
SD card slot or eMMC module |
SD card slot |
|
Connectivity |
4 x USB, micro HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet, infra red remote control receiver |
4 x USB, HDMI, Ethernet, 3.5mm 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 |
$35 |
$35 |
Following is an image of the Odroid-C1 board:
The Odroid board is manufactured by a company called Hard kernel. The official web page of the Odroid-C1 board is http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G141578608433.
The Odroid-C1 is a basic model in the Odroid series. There are more powerful boards as well, such as Odroid-XU4, XU3, and U3. All these boards support ROS.
One of the popular single board computers is Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi boards are manufactured by Raspberry Pi Foundation which is based in the UK. The latest model of Raspberry Pi is Raspberry Pi 2. The official website of Raspberry Pi is https://www.raspberrypi.org.
Following is a diagram of Raspberry Pi 2:
The Odroid GPIO pins and its GPIO handling is much similar to Raspberry Pi 2.
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 also 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 or install Ubuntu which is inbuilt with ROS, OpenCV, and PCL.
Installing ROS from the source code and packages will take several hours. For a quick start, we can start with a pre-installed image of Ubuntu with ROS.
The image can be download from http://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=112&t=11994. This link contains pre-installed images of Ubuntu with ROS, OpenCV, and PCL for Odroid C1.
The list of the other operating systems supported on Odroid-C1 is given on the wiki page of Odroid-C1 at http://odroid.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=en:odroid-c1.
The official guide of installing ROS on Odroid and Raspberry Pi 2 into their official OS is available at http://wiki.ros.org/indigo/Installation/UbuntuARM.
The Raspberry Pi 2 official OS images are given at https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/.
The official OS supported by Raspberry Pi foundation are Raspbian and Ubuntu. There are unofficial images based on this OS which has ROS pre-installed on them. The following link has some of the Raspberry Pi 2 images which have ROS preinstalled:
http://www.mauriliodicicco.com/raspberry-pi2-ros-images/
We can get ROS based images for Raspbian and Ubuntu from the preceding link.
In this section, we are using the Raspbian based ROS images for the experiments.