v0.19
Highlights
- Raspberry Pi 4 support
The image is now based on Raspbian Buster, and with that the newest addition to the Raspberry Pi lineup is now supported. Older boards are supported as well. - ROS Melodic
ROS distribution was upgraded along with the underlying system. - OpenCV 3.4.8
OpenCV also got an upgrade. OpenCV is now installed as a system library (as opposed to being a ROS package) and is bumped to version 3.4.8. Our ROS packages take full advantage of this. - vl53l1x driver improvements
The rangefinder driver is more flexible, exposing more data from the sensor. - Quality-of-life additions and fixes
Additional checks inselfcheck.py, shorter boot times, syslog size limits and more.
We are excited to bring you the next version of our Clever drone image! This release's main focus is Raspberry Pi 4 support. We've decided to keep the number of added features to the minimum, instead focusing on the platform support and stability.
Supporting Raspberry Pi 4 would mean transitioning to Raspbian Buster. That, in turn, would also mean we'd have to make some hard decisions: do we try and stay with ROS Kinetic or do we move forward and transition to ROS Melodic? If we go with Melodic, do we stick to the system OpenCV (effectively downgrading it) or do we package our own? Ultimately, we've decided to go with Melodic and an upgraded OpenCV: Kinetic is nearing its EOL date, and having a system-wide OpenCV installation that we build ourselves allowed us to add features that are typically missing in Debian distributions like GStreamer support.
User experience is improved as well. We have added more checks in the selfcheck.py script and shortened our boot times by reorganizing package loading order.
As always, you can see our full commit changelog between v0.18 and v0.19: v0.18...v0.19.