Learn how to build your robot project in hours not months with Ubiquity Robotics Magni at one of our roadshow events! Building robot applications is hard, mainly because you have to spend months and years building something that has payload capability, mobility, navigation and a compute infrastructure and you have to do this before you can even build the cool cocktail waiter application or follow me robot. The hacker dojo gave rise to a group that wanted to solve this problem and they built Magni, a robot based on open source software that has all this working out of the box. [Read More]

Santa Clara, CA on Tuesday 23rd of January 2018 What Learn how to build your robot project in hours not months with Ubiquity Robotics Magni! Building robot applications is hard, mainly because you have to spend months and years building something that has payload capability, mobility, navigation and a compute infrastructure and you have to do this before you can even build the cool cocktail waiter application or follow me robot. [Read More]

After any amount of serious ROS development, you quickly run into a common deployment issue. How can I build debian packages or ‘debs’ for my stuff so that other people can use them? For open-source packages, like ours at Ubiquity, this is easy enough, just use bloom and follow the instructions. This works great, and the OSRF buildfarm will handle the building of the packages and all of complexities involved. [Read More]

It has been a long standing joke that most hobby robot builders only wanted a robot to be able to fetch them a beer. Well Magni can do it!

https://www.facebook.com/ubiquityrobotics/videos/1523912854313397

Every once and a while we make videos of our project progress and post them to YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTYY2VsUazlAy9Is33e9dScDBtzVX3L31

We are proud to announce the first stable release of our Raspberry Pi Camera Node. We have worked through the issues that we talked about in previous blog posts to the point where we feel comfortable with a stable, public release of the code. The reposistory is here: https://github.com/UbiquityRobotics/raspicam_node. We have tested this node on both the 4.1 and 4.4 kernels from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, using our Ubuntu Image, but it should work with ROS on Raspbian as well. [Read More]

Robots, especially ROS ones, need Wifi connectivity. With the Raspberry Pi 3, a lot of the software/firmware level headaches are alleviated thanks to the hard work of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. However, in their efforts to keep the Pi 3 the same size, and make FCC compliance easier, they had to put a pretty wimpy ceramic “chip” antenna for Wifi and Bluetooth. In order to get better wifi connectivity on the Pi 3, I decided to venture into finding a way get an external antenna hooked up. [Read More]

After the previous build server setup had destroyed itself with fire, much like the Phoenix from the Ashes, I decided to reincarnate it in a slightly more resilient (read non-flammable) case. The king is dead, long live the king: I used an Extended-ATX case with a dead motherboard I had lying around, and put all the boards and the hard drives in it. There is also an 8-Port Ethernet switch that connects to all the boards and means there is only 1 Ethernet coming out of the box. [Read More]

Early this morning I woke up to the smell of burning insulation, turns out it was coming from the Ubiquity (formerly Raspbian) build farm. After some investigation (and making sure everything/everyone else was not on fire), it looks like one of the disk drives failed catastrophically, causing a short that burned the wires going from it to the PSU, along with the wires it was bundled with. I haven’t tried spinning up the drive again to verify its deadness, but the main board for the drive looks mostly healthy. [Read More]

Frankly, there was an element of luck required to figure out how to get the Raspberry Pi camera working under Ubuntu. The reason why is described below. The raspicam node uses the Raspbery Pi video camera interface API (Application Programming Interface) to access the image data. The Raspberry Pi camera is actually connected to the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) where specialized graphics processing units can manipulate the image before it is forwarded on to the main ARM7 cores. [Read More]