[Dprglist] RPi running ROS, booted from SSD

[Paul Bouchier]

DPRG folks - a couple of RBNV's ago there was a discussion about booting an
RPi from SSD, and how fast it would be, and (supposedly) how
straightforward it is to do. Doug P. didn't have specific HW
recommendations for SSD brands or USB-SATA converters, however there seemed
to be general interest in that information.

Naturally, I wanted Mowbot's ROS SW to have a large fast disk for bagfiles
etc, and naively thought it would be as easy as the web pages I read said
it would be.The kink turned out to be that ROS noetic requires Ubuntu 20.04
(current release is 21.10), and 20.04 won't boot "out of the box" from SSD.
:-(

After 4 days of frustration I finally found a page where someone provided
scripts and instructions specifically for RPi Ubuntu 20.04 booting off SSD,
and now Mowbot's RPi is booting and running its ROS apps off SSD.

In the spirit of paying forward the good info that had been given to me, I
documented the hardware I used (apparently there's a lot of not-good HW out
there) and the procedure for getting Ubuntu 20.04 booting off SSD and ROS
installed and all the rest of the Linux setup. See Mowbot's web page:
https://sites.google.com/site/paulbouchier/home/mowbot
The HW Configuration -> Compute Subsystem section has the HW I used. The
RPi Configuration section has the steps and links to pages that made it
work.

I hope this is useful to someone. I'll show it at tonight's RBNV.

Paul
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