robo-init

robo-init is an extension to cloud-init from Canonical and adds some robot/hardware-specific functionality. If you have a robot which needs "hardware"-configuration, you can use robo-init to consistently set up things like:

• wifi and other network connections
• install packages
• create udev rules for serial or USB communications
• set up users and user groups
• configure RaspberryPi and RaspberryPi overlays

robo-init is an open source project and licensed under the BSD3 license. We're happy to collaborate!

How to use

You will have to write a YAML file that describes your desired configuration. An example yaml file is in the example/niryo.yml folder. After installing this program using pip install -e . you will be able to run robo-initgen myfile.yml.

To run the example: robo-initgen example/niryo.yml

This will create a new folder: generated_boot_config. Inside of this folder, you'll find three files:

• network-config
• user-data
• usercfg.txt

The usercfg.txt file contains the additional configuration for a RaspberryPi. The network-config file contains the network configuration for the wifi and ethernet connections. The user-data contains the information on what users you want to set up initially and more. All of this is derived from the initial "niryo.yml" file.

If you're running a Ubuntu RaspberryPi image, you can just drop these files in the boot partition and replace the ones that are there by default.

Configuring the robot as a hotspot

NOTE: we're still investigating how to do this optimally, the current answer is based on link.

To configure the robot as a hotspot / access point you can generate the appropriate netplan configuration through cloud-init. Because the "NetworkManager" renderer is required, the network-manager package has to be installed first though.

sudo apt install network-manager

# you could maybe also write this file directly to `/etc/netplan/10-hotspot.yaml`
# since cloud-init writes to `50-cloud-init.yaml`, thus overriding the cloud-init config.
network:
  version: 2
  renderer: NetworkManager
  ethernets:
    eth0:
      dhcp4: true
      optional: true
  wifis:
    wlan0:
      dhcp4: true
      optional: true
      access-points:
        "Raspberry":
          password: "your password here"
          mode: ap