Initially Shikher thought that buying a low power armh processor was a very wise choice. Low power meant lower battery consumption so lighter batteries. Also single chip armh processors like Raspberry Pi and Odroid are way cheaper. The world was good. Until one day OpenCV came along. Initially he seemed like a nice guy. Resourceful. With his awesome HighGUI and shiny high power tools like HoughCircle, Contrast stretching he seemed like a guy Shikher could rely on. But soon Shikher became so dependant on him that he forgot the limited hardware that had to support OpenCV. The world started breaking apart. Shikher was caught up between using powerful tools of OpenCV or making the resource requirements low for odroid u3 and raspberry pi 2 boards. Eventually it became clear that there was no other way, Shikher started looking for stronger boards which could meet the requirements of OpenCV. He soon came across NUC; One of the most powerful boards used in robotics projects. Although the specs were great but it came with a big setback to our budget, and using it also meant increased battery consumption. Shikher tried to weigh to pros and cons of it and presented this to my team so that they will go forward with the purchase.
Pros:
Cons:
Hmm, how to log cpu usage. How to do this?
May be capture output of some monitor periodically against the pid of our process ?
What to use ? top
/htop
/ps
?
ps
’s output seems easily processable.
Start all the nodes and note their pid (process indentifier).
So after starting all the ros nodes and roscore we need to log the output of ps periodically. Writing a script to log ps output. Luckily there was already such a thing writen. I found which does exactly this.
Time (s) | i5 CPU% | rpi CPU% |
---|---|---|
1 | 29 | 70.2 |
2 | 26 | 75.9 |
3 | 25.6 | 95.4 |
4 | 25 | 93.7 |
5 | 25.4 | 94.2 |
6 | 24.6 | 95.6 |
7 | 21.2 | 95.4 |
8 | 21.3 | 95.3 |
9 | 21.1 | 95.4 |
10 | 21.2 | 95.4 |
Intel Next Unit of Computing is a 64 bit motherboard + Processor kit. Along with it you will have to buy Ram and SSD. For anyone looking to upgrade their robot’s cpu I suggest buying Intel NUC NUC5i7RYH.
Buying it :
Mandatory Accessories to Buy:
Information links :
Powering it :
Integrating RAM and MiniSSD:
After all this, I also ordered a router. Now we are planning to run nuc, rpi and odroid all together so the whole ros software can be distributing across the whole linux cluster. This would also provide support for low power mode, when battery is low we can switch off nuc and use minimal control via rpi to bring auv back surface. Also fault tolerance is introduced. Even if one of the boards fail the rest can work in emergency.