Skip to content

README.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
79 lines (61 loc) · 3.48 KB

README.md

File metadata and controls

79 lines (61 loc) · 3.48 KB

Bento-Box container

This directory contains source and configuration files of Bento-Box's container subsystem.
The use of containers drastically reduces fault recovery time (for instance a dead SD card or software crash),
and automates many tasks for us (such as programmatically setting up/configuring software and starting containers on boot).

Containers are like faster virtual machines, which you can configure using a compose.yml file, telling it what hardware and files to access.
Images are like read-only hard-drives for containers. You can always delete a container and create a new, identical one from the same Image.

Important commands

docker restart bento-box-ros - restart the container (software crash, hardware glitch, etc)
docker start bento-box-ros - forcibly start container (if autostart were to fail)
docker ps - list running containers
docker ps -a - list all containers
docker images - list all images
docker logs --since 2m bento-box-ros - show container logs of last 2 minutes (see what exactly crashed)
ℹ️📂 cd xx/Bento-Box/container - go to this here folder, needed for all docker compose xx commands!
👉📁 docker compose down - shut down and delete container (clean up, disables autostart)
👉📁 docker compose restart - restart the container (same as docker restart)
👉📁 docker compose up - set up and start container (use after docker compose down, enables autostart)

Installation

Building the container image will download (compressed) ∼281MB (ros2 image), ∼400MB of packages, and in total use ∼4GB of storage.
Internet connection required

ℹ️ If you are setting up Bento-Box from scratch, follow the installation guide at system-files/README.md.
This here is only for the container system.

# Set up Docker & tools we'll need
sudo apt update
sudo apt install docker.io docker-compose-v2 git -y
sudo usermod -aG $USER docker
sudo reboot

# (Set up this Repo and) Build image and start container
#git clone https://github.com/Bento-Robotics/Bento-Box.git
cd Bento-Box/container
docker compose up -d  # if it can't find ros:jazzy, retry after doing `docker pull docker.io/library/ros:jazzy`

Alternative for low-spec or offline bots

For when your robot is too weak to build an image (for instance a pi zero), or there is no way of connecting it to the Internet.

Example: building an Image for a arm64 robot (raspberry pi):

# On PC
cd xx/Bento-Box/container/build/
docker build --arch=arm64 --tag bento-box:jazzy-arm .
docker image save -o bento-box_jazzy-arm.tar bento-box:jazzy-arm

# Transfer file over ssh (any kind of file transfer will do)
scp bento-box_jazzy-arm.tar 192.168.robot.ip:~/

# On Robot
docker image load -i bento-box_jazzy-arm.tar
docker images  # Image should now show up in list

Configuring

Containers run one file / line of bash, and shut down if it ends.

What the container runs

Last line in compose.yml:

command: 'ros2 launch bento-box.launch.py robot_namespace:="bento_box"'

Example for doing multiple things:

command: bash -c 'while true; do cansend can0 580#0241AD347300; sleep 1; done&  ros2 launch bento-box.launch.py robot_namespace:="bento_box"''

What ROS runs

Everything in bento-box.launch.py

Parameter files of the individual Nodes started by said launch file are under launch-content/parameters