search

Kinovarobotics / kinova-movo

Source code of the Kinova MOVO platform
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
43 stars 37 forks source link

Way to update packages on movo2, movo1 without removing skin #20

Open aaronsnoswell opened 6 years ago

aaronsnoswell commented 6 years ago

To install new packages on the MOVO PC's the current suggested solution (e.g. see wiki page here or discussion here is to connect movo1 and movo2 to an organisational network with internet access so that sudo apt-get install <pkg> can work.

For movo2 this is fairly straightforward as the HMI panel ethernet port can be used, however for movo1 this requires removing the skin. This is not desirable, especially as e.g. on our robot, the thread of the screws holding the skin are stripped, making it very hard to get the skin on/off.

For the 1.1.0 release, I found a way to do this without connecting the movo PC's to the internet (see here). However this is a slow manual process and prone to error.

I'd like to propose that a better solution would be if instructions could be provided so that the aptitude repository for Ubuntu 14 could be hosted either on a movo development PC, or on a flash drive that could be connected to the HMI port (e.g. see instructions here on hosting aptitude repos on a flash drive).

Potential drawbacks of this approach;

I'd love to hear any other thoughts about a better way to update movo1, movo2 packages without removing the skin.

aaronsnoswell commented 6 years ago

I had another thought here: I wonder if it is possible to bridge the internet connection from the dev PC to the MOVO PCs? I'm not sure what this would look like, but I found e.g. this post talking about something similar on Ubuntu.

martine1406 commented 6 years ago

HI @aaronsnoswell

From what I understand, what is recommended in the wiki page is not to connect movo1 and movo2 computers to the internet, but rather to use your remote/development PC connected to internet and update the code from your development PC using ssh or rsync over ssh or mounting movo’s file system from the development PC and dragging/dropping the code from the PC to MOVO. These solutions do not involve getting movo computers an internet access.

Alternatively, what this discussion explains is how to connect movo PCs (movo1 and movo2) to the internet to directly clone code from the github and adding future new useful packages to movo1 and movo2.

I will bring you suggestion of hosting an aptitude repository on a flash drive to our software team and see what they think. Or the bridging you suggest. I'll let you know as soon as I have more answers.

Thanks

aaronsnoswell commented 6 years ago

Thanks @martine1406. At our end we have had some discussion and are going to try and set up a local apt repository on our movo dev machine. This requires about 15GB per architecture, per Ubuntu version apparently. Once this is done we should be able to add the local PPA to the movo1 and movo2 apt configurations, then just run apt-get on each of them without hassles. I'll let you know how we progress.

In the mean time, I've developed a script that allows for apt-get type package installations by downloading on movo dev then copying them across. I'll share it here as it might be useful to the community.

martine1406 commented 6 years ago

10-4. Thanks for the info. Very useful indeed