Quick start with Erle-Brain

Connecting to Erle-Brain

There are several ways to connect to Erle-Brain:

Using a WiFi dongle (5 GHz frequency)

If you purchased your brain with WiFi you'll see that we attached and configured a dongle that will create automatically a WiFi network (hotspot mode) with names with an erle preffix. The IP address of Erle-Brain is generally 11.0.0.1 and your machine should get the 11.0.0.2 (DHCP server has been configured to assign only one address).

Make sure that your laptop/phone/tablet/... has 5 GHz support. You should look for 802.11 ac support.

Erle-Brain creates a network called "erle-something" or "erle". The password for the network is holaerle.

Then SSH into the board:

ssh [email protected]

(Windows users, try PuTTY to SSH into the board)

Through mini USB

Erle-Brain supports client mode USB. Using this connection mechanism and the Ethernet-over-USB kernel module you should be able to SSH into the board.

To do so, connect Erle-Brain using the mini USB connector:

Find the new network interface that should've been created in your OS and assign the following IP address: 192.168.7.1. Assuming that your new interface is eth6 and you are in Linux:

sudo ifconfig eth6 192.168.7.1

Now that you are in the same subnet just ssh into the board:

ssh [email protected]

Using a GCS (MissionPlanner, APMPlanner, DroidPlanner, etc)

Select UDP and use the IP address 11.0.0.1 and the port 6000.

Checking the processes

ps -e

You should see ArduCopter.elf and apm4-startup.sh running.

Changing to other vehicle

Let's assume you wish to use Erle-Brain with plane:

cd ardupilot/ArduPlane
make configure
make pxf
# this will create a binary called ArduPlane.elf at ~/build
cp ~/ArduPlane.elf ~/

Now you'll need to update the startup scripts to launch plane instead of copter. To do so edit the /etc/init.d/apm4-startup.sh file and at the bottom of the file modify the ArduCopter launch call for an ArduPlane one.

Launching ROS

roscore &

Now make check the nodes an topics available:

rosnode list
rostopic list