Raspberry Pi as Robot Radio

Technical Technical Discussion
1

Figured I’d share this here, but I’ve made a backup of my Raspberry Pi 4 (arm64) SD card. This is an almost completely vanilla installation of Raspbian Lite (arm64) with modifications to:

  • Assign DHCP addresses to clients connected on eth0 and wlan0 (bridged to br0)
  • Broadcast an AP (DALTZ-TESTBENCH)
    • Password is “daltzbench” (no quotes)
  • SSH credentials is pi with 1 empty space as the password. (" ")
  • Static IP set to 10.0.66.1
  • Assigns DHCP addresses within range 10.0.66.2 - 10.0.66.200

Users may want to change the IP range and AP credentials. Users must ensure the static IP of the Pi matches the DHCP range being handed out.

To change the IP range

  1. Edit /etc/dnsmasq.conf, replacing 10.0.66.2,10.0.66.200,255.255.255.0,12h with whatever you want the IP ranges to be assigned to
  2. Edit /etc/network/interfaces, replacing address 10.0.66.1 with the same 10.XX.XX you did in the previous step

To change the AP details

  1. sudo nano /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf
  2. Modify wpa_passphrase and ssid with the credentials you want

After everything is all done, reboot. If in a bad state, reflash the image and try again.

Additional remarks

If code (such as LL or Photonvision) relies on the Rio being 10.TE.AM.2, it will not work properly. To get this to work properly, you can static IP the roboRIO to be a .2 address. MDNS should work just fine.

Oh, and obviously this isn’t competition legal. It probably has horrible latency issues at any sort of a distance and is prone to the SD card randomly borking itself.

Download

GDrive: pi_as_robot_radio.img - Google Drive

11 Likes
2

This is cool! I’ve been meaning to research this topic a little, as I want to set up a driver station type controller with a raspi radio communicating with ROS running on another pi in (and I know how unpractical and strange this sounds) a beetle weight combat robot. Is this image only for FRC type applications, or would this work as a general AP for any type of robotics application?

3

OpenWRT runs on the Pi these days and it might make this all a lot easier: https://openwrt.org/toh/raspberry_pi_foundation/raspberry_pi

1 Like
4

Nothing except the ranges make it FRC specific.

5

I wanted to keep it raspbian so I can also use it for other things (mini-bot powered by a CANivore).

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