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Getting started with Core Research

Congratulations on your Core Research 5-Camera Development Kit! Start using it by following these simple steps:

What's in the box?

  • The sensor: a development kit with 5 cameras and an IMU (synchronized)
  • Cable adapter from the 2.1x5.5 mm Barrel Plug of the AC adapter to the Molex Nano-Fit connector of the sensor

What else is needed?

  • A Category 6 (Cat6) Ethernet cable to transfer the data to your device
  • A 12V 25W AC wall adapter with a 2.1x5.5 mm Barrel Plug that mates to the adapter cable (eg. CUI SWI25-12-E-P5 with an EU plug)

Installing the driver

ℹ️ Info: Have a look at the Installation page for a list of supported Ubuntu versions and processor architectures.

Ubuntu 18.04 or 20.04 is required to install the driver. We also recommend installing ROS Melodic/Noetic desktop-full (ROS installation) A ros-base installation is sufficient, but we recommend the desktop-full to use the rqt GUI tools mentioned in other parts of this manual.

The following instructions describe the steps for adding the Sevensense APT repository and installing the Alphasense driver contained therein.

# Install curl.
sudo apt install curl

# Add the Sevensense PGP key to make this machine trust Sevensense's packages.
curl -Ls http://deb.7sr.ch/pubkey.gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/deb-7sr-ch-keyring.gpg

# Add the Sevensense APT repository to the list of known sources.
echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/deb-7sr-ch-keyring.gpg] http://deb.7sr.ch/alphasense/stable $(lsb_release -cs) main" \
          | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sevensense.list

# Install the Alphasense driver.
sudo apt update
sudo apt install alphasense-driver-core alphasense-viewer alphasense-firmware ros-melodic-alphasense-driver-ros ros-melodic-alphasense-driver

Setting up the network configuration

In order to connect your Core Research device to your computer, a network configuration with a static IP needs to be set up.

To set this up, open a terminal, launch the nm-connection-editor and add a new Ethernet connection:

nm_connection_editor

Name the new connection alphasense. Under the IPv4 Settings tab, change the method to Manual and add the following static IP address:

ip_settings

Save the new configuration.

By default the sensor is configured with the following network settings.

Setting Value
Host IP Address 192.168.77.78
Host Netmask 255.255.255.0
Sensor IP Address 192.168.77.77

Running the driver

Connect the sensor to the power cable and the Ethernet cable. Click on the Network Manager icon (usually located in the top bar of Ubuntu) and select the alphasense network connection.

There are two ways to run the Alphasense driver, described in the following two sections:

1) Launching the standalone viewer

First increase the maximum allowed socket buffer size:

sudo sysctl -w net.core.rmem_max=11145728

This setting can be made permanent by creating a file called /etc/sysctl.d/90-increase-network-buffers.conf with the option:

echo -e "net.core.rmem_max=11145728" | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/90-increase-network-buffers.conf

After that, you can launch the Alphasense GUI which will display all available image streams.

Launch the Alphasense GUI with the following command:

viewalphasense

viewalphasense

sevensense@7s-workstation:~$ viewalphasense
Found camera, opening...
[ INFO|2020-07-21 15:53:21.389801] Assuming camera is connected to NIC enp5s0.
Opened! writing settings...
[ INFO|2020-07-21 15:53:21.391719] Calculated an inter packet delay of 1 us.
[ INFO|2020-07-21 15:53:21.593148] Reallocating image stream packet buffers (6990 packets @ 1500 bytes).
[ INFO|2020-07-21 15:53:21.595462] Resizing image socket buffer to 10485760 bytes.
Ready!
202 IMU measurements received in 1 second.
|- Current IMU measurement timestamp: 12 190998900
|- accl.x: -1.6711
|- accl.y: -0.0843384
|- accl.z: -9.47461
|- gyro.x: 0.000213059
|- gyro.y: 0.0288695
|- gyro.z: -0.00255671

2) Launching the ROS driver

As an alternative to using the standalone viewer and in order to access the streamed data, our ROS driver can be used. Note that only one driver at a time can be running, so viewalphasense needs to be stopped before launching this one.

If not already done before, increase the maximum allowed socket buffer size:

sudo sysctl -w net.core.rmem_max=11145728

Start the ROS driver of Alphasense, run the following command:

source /opt/ros/melodic/setup.bash
roscore&
rosrun alphasense_driver_ros alphasense_driver_ros

Via ROS messages we offer an easy way to access the images and the IMU data. See ROS Interface for more information on the provided topics and configuration parameters.

We recommend tools such as rqt_image_view and rqt_plot to inspect the images and the IMU data.

Find out more about the sensor settings and how to permanently set them here.