Macfeegle Prime is heading back to PiWars!

A lot has happened in that time, ignoring the whole *gestures broadly at the world*, a lot has moved on in software terms. We now have Ubuntu 20.04 for the Pi, ROS Noetic has been released for it, and Approximate Engineering has rewritten the RedBoard+ library from scratch.

This library also includes support for the servo board I’m using meaning that all the servos can be controlled from the same library, it’ll be one less thing for the Teensy to do so I thought I’d start here.

Notes

Installation of the library using “pip install redboard” works a treat, it includes a GUI that lets you tweak the configuration. If you try using “redboard-gui” on Ubuntu however you’ll find the pigpio daemon isn’t included, I had to install it from source so follow the instructions here.

Next issue I hit was that I didn’t have permission to access i2c, with Raspbian you can run raspi-config to enable and disable access to various interfaces but that isn’t available on Ubuntu. I followed these steps to get it working:

First create a new file using nano:

sudo nano /lib/udev/rules.d/60-i2c-tools.rules

Then add the following lines:

KERNEL=="i2c-0" , GROUP="i2c", MODE="0660" 
KERNEL=="i2c-[1-9]*", GROUP="i2c", MODE="0666"

Reboot, then run “sudo pigpiod” followed by “redboard-gui” and you should get the following:

You’ll need to run “sudo pigpiod” on startup, to do that run “sudo crontab -e” and add the following to the end of the file:

@reboot /usr/local/bin/pigpiod

Reboot and you’re good to go!