The TortugaBot is a little robot which has an ASUS Xtion Pro Live as sensor. It is mainly build from acrylc glass and Aluminium bars. To move he is using two EMG30 or EMG49 motors which get their power from a 11.1V 2500mAh Li-Po battery. He gets controlled by a Laptop which has to be put in the LispBot.

The Partlist is here.

The CAD Model Download is gonna be here soon.

The TortugaBot laptops are small Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 10 netbooks. Their specs are: CPU: Intel N3530 2.16GHz

• The OS the netbooks are running is the latest LTS version of Ubuntu, ATM it is Ubuntu 14.04
• All the laptops should have a Desktop version of ROS installed. ATM it is ros-indigo-desktop
• The software repo for TortugaBots is in https://github.com/code-iai/tortugabot
• Right now it seems that you need both rosbuild and catkin workspaces. The repo code should go into catkin.

• For students we usually create users with no admin access
• To make sure the OS won't go to bed when closing the lid change the following settings:
  • Unordered List ItemIn “Power” settings of your “System settings” change from “suspending” to “doing nothing” when closing the lid
  • In “Brightness and Lock” settings turn the lock off.

For completely new laptops or reinstalling the OS.

The usual convention is:

• Right now the only OS on the netbooks is Ubuntu, so we get rid of the Windows
• To get access to the boot menu (because the laptops are running UEFI) start Windows, keep the Shift key pressed while pressing “Restart”, when an advanced menu comes up choose troubleshooting (the button with the screwdriver on the picture) and choose configure UEFI, this will restart the computer and get you into the boot menu.
• When installing your Ubuntu configure the boot menu to
  • disable safe boot
  • enable legacy boot
  • when installing from USB, make sure the USB boot is enabled
• The hostname (computer name) of TortugaBot laptops are usually tortugabotN, where N is the serial number
• To make sure the OS doesn't go to sleep or hibernate when you close the lid, in /etc/systemd/logind.conf add (uncomment) the folowing line:

HandleLidSwitch=ignore

• The dedicated network for TortugaBots is the “tortugabot” wiki access point, which connects you to the internal lab Ethernet. So, when keeping people access to the network please keep in mind that the robots are also in that network and that accidentally having a torrent daemon running in the background can get our research group into trouble.
• To make sure the laptops don't connect to UniBremen wifi automatically, in the network settings get rid of that network get rid of the Ticks on automatically connecting and on allowing all users to connect to it.
• To enable ssh access install sudo apt-get install openssh-server
• We usually install the Desktop version of ROS: e.g. ros-indigo-desktop. You might also want to install the wstool and rosinstall, they're both sudo apt-get install python-BLA.
• You might also want to run sudo rosdep init

Install QtSix according to the instructions here:

QtSixA in Sourceforge

Basically:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:falk-t-j/qtsixa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install qtsixa
sudo /etc/init.d/sixad start

Then connect the DualShock3 controller over USB with a mini-usb cable. And start “qtsixa”. There select Tasks → Pair Device to PC → DualShock controller

After that, the device should be paired to the laptop. And if you press the “Playstation” button (in the center), it should connect to the laptop. It vibrates a little to confirm.