RobbieThe Green Razbot now has an RPi 2B installed inside with one of the original MCU boards.
I updated the Razbot image to support the RP2 2 according to the following:
http://thepihut.com/blogs/raspberry-pi-tutorials/16982376-updating-raspbian-on-your-microsd-for-the-raspberry-pi-2
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/raspbian/updating.md
On the first shot it worked great. The robot started the MJPG-Streamer for the camera as well as the ROSCORE and required packages. The robot drove around and streamed video as normal. Using Putty to ssh into the Pi was much faster on the Pi2.
The catch: the Pi 2 appears to be much more sensitive to SD card corruption when interrupting the power supply. (Powering off the Razbot by hitting the switch). This makes sense, if you kill the power while writing to the SD card, goodbye SD card. SSH-ing into the robot everytime you want to shut down sort of sucks
For now I'll have to lock down the boot partition as read only to ensure it doesn't corrupt.
In the long run it looks like we might wanted a larger capacitor on the MCU board (which has the 5V power supply). Using a GPIO pin to detect primary power loss, issue a sync command before losing secondary power (thanks Greg J for the suggestion) .
Hammering out all the minor details related to mech / elec / software and getting things to run smoothly and reliably is has got to be one of the biggest challenges in robotics. Before you can go implementing the latest sensors and SLAM algorithms you need a platform that works reliably and finding / building one is not always an easy task.
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So it turns out this was a disk checking utility holding up the book sequence. I removed this by editing /etc/fstab and setting the 6th field for each partition to from 1 or 2 to 0, indicating the partitions don't need to be checked on boot. I've also changed the boot partition to read only. Now the RPi2 is working nicely with the Razbot. It is much faster to work with over SSH. Looking forward to seeing what we can do with this.
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