Straight out of the box, my RAE rattles and does not turn on

gregflurry

I unboxed my RAE and right out of the box it rattles when I move it a bit, e.g., to turn it on. Is this normal?

Despite the rattle, I pushed the power button once, and nothing happened. That suggests the battery arrived discharged. Is that normal?

So far, the only good news is that I connected the RAE to an Apple charging brick (5.2V @ 2.4A) and it lit up. Since there is no documentation, I don't know if that means it is charging or that it is on.

After playing with the power switch, which seems very flaky, it seems that the "lit up" condition suggests it is on. It took several attempts to "double press" the switch to turn it off. Is this normal?

Sigh.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

jakaskerl

Hi gregflurry
Sorry you are experiencing issues with RAE. It might be discharged. Did you try plugging it in for an hour or so?

Here is the getting started documentation: https://docs-beta.luxonis.com/deploy/connect-device/rae/

cc @DaniloPejovic

Thanks,
Jaka

DaniloPejovic

I generally use full reboot where you need to hold power button for a while (8-10 seconds to turn it off) - similarly like turning off a PC with power button. It is a robot that is moving fairly near to the ground, accidental presses of power button (small obstacle, picking it up,...) will happen all the time. Double click should turn it off too.

Yea, it seems your battery was empty. Very small amout of rattling when you shake the robot should be ok, but it shouldnt be anything that you would notice during normal operation.

So far, the only good news is that I connected the RAE to an Apple charging brick (5.2V @ 2.4A) and it lit up.

What do you mean by lit up? If you mean that every LED turned white, that would indicate it is on.

For starting setups I would suggest connecting RAE to just to your PC/laptop via USB-C cable and ssh into it (its IP address will be 192.168.197.55). There you can check if it is charging by checking:

cat /sys/class/power_supply/bq27441-0/status

That will either tell you if robot is charging or discharging.

gregflurry

I will try to reply to the post from @jakaskerl and @DaniloPejovic. Thanks to you both.

First the good news.

I let my RAE charge over night, and it turned on! I fired up RobotHub and connected to my WiFi network successfully (mostly?). In the 'robots' section of the Hub I can see my RAE, apparently named keembay online, with the "RAE - Default app" installed as the only Perception App.

Selecting keembay, the overview says about half of the RAM is used and almost all of the Disk is used (surprising). The default app is stopped. I can, from my laptop, ping keembay at its iPv4 address.

If I go to the Devices tab, I can see a RAE Device, assigned to nothing (a -), a Status is ready. I can click on the Video Preview button and a very slow and delayed video will play.

In the Perception Apps tab, I can see the default app, with a Status of stopped, and Assigned Devices showing nothing. I am not sure what that means.

Now the bad news.

Selecting the default app brings up another page specific to the app. The title says "Stopped" and "All changes synchronized". The Activity tab says the app was started about 2 hours ago (I've tried many times, but more on that coming). In the "Live View" tab, I see "No streams available."

If I try to Start the app, the title changes from "Stopped" to "Initializing" to "Stopped". There are 4 attempts, and the app then remains "Stopped". At that point the Logs tab repeats the following
[2023-10-27 16:52:15.902] [depthai] [warning] USB protocol not available - If running in a container, make sure that the following is set: "-v /dev/bus/usb:/dev/bus/usb --device-cgroup-rule='c 189:* rmw'"

11:52:17ERROR | on_start:151 => The default app requires an assigned device to run. Please go to RobotHub, navigate to the app's page, click the "Reassign devices" button and select a device.

11:52:17INFO | on_stop:173 => Stopping the app...

I have no clue what the first line means. When I click the "Reassign devices" button, a popup says "You have no available devices to assign to app". I have no idea what is wrong.

I noticed at the end of the "Connect RAE" web page a sentence "RAE also has a special menu for direct control. To access to it: … Copy and paste the <IP of RAE>:9010 into your preferred browser". If I do that with the iPv4 address for my device I see the error message "can't open the page because the server unexpectedly dropped the connection". I have no idea what is wrong or how to fix it.

I should add that I've turned of the RAE several times, restarted RobotHub several times, and I always see what I describe above.

Any additional suggestions?

jakaskerl

infinite-loup EDIT: I removed the Perception Apps from RAE, and installed 1.2.0 again. It did successfully install, but then started spinning in circles until I mashed the power button enough times for it to finally die.

Rae spins in circles when follow-me mode is enabled, which was introduced in 1.2.0. This just means the rae has not found a person to follow, so it tries to spin to find someone.

gregflurry I have no clue what the first line means. When I click the "Reassign devices" button, a popup says "You have no available devices to assign to app". I have no idea what is wrong.

If the reassign doesn't work, easiest way to do it would be deleting the app and installing it again, making sure you assign the rae to the app. Are you using rae 1.12 firmware?

Thanks,
Jaka

infinite-loup

I ran into the exact same problems above, minus the rattle. I got a little further by clicking on the "Robots" icon on the left side panel, then the "Perception Apps" tab, then the "+Install App" button. I clicked the "Run" button, then "RAE", then chose version 1.1.1 (1.2.0 is the latest, but my suspicion is it's buggy), clicked the "RAE" device that showed up, then "Install with devices". It took a while to install, but I got a second instance of "RAE - Default app" on the app list, and it said, "Running".

However, after doing all of that, I still couldn't do anything with the unit, because clicking "Open Frontend" and then "Control" popped up a tab that appeared to start to load, then it just told me that Firefox isn't supported and that I should use Chrome, and other than that I got a blank page. I'm shocked that a device ostensibly meant to encourage hacking on robots via an open platform in 2023 would force users away from the open-standards-conformant Firefox in favor of Chrome. I've written my share of remote camera/telemetry web interfaces, some that ran on an ESP8266 controlling a robot, and never once even considered something wouldn't run in Firefox (and they all have without a hitch).

EDIT: I removed the Perception Apps from RAE, and installed 1.2.0 again. It did successfully install, but then started spinning in circles until I mashed the power button enough times for it to finally die.

So far, RAE has been a very hot, very disappointing paperweight with poor documentation.

jakaskerl

Hi infinite-loup and gregflurry
Sorry for the wait time, had to ask the dev team.

gregflurry Note the line that says "FW version … Luxonis OS 1.12". The video suggests it should say "FW version … KeemBay 1.12". That suggests that provisioning loaded the wrong firmware. I repeat, I did not do anything explicit to load firmware. I've accessed my RAE solely through RobotHub, and the only explicit actions I'd done are to uninstall apps and install apps.

You are running the correct version, Keembay was just an older name for the OS.

gregflurry There is one other thing that suggests the wrong firmware got installed. The bottom of the "get started" page suggests https://<IP of RAE>:9010 gets you into a control program. I get a "server refused connection" error, so I suspect the firmware that is running does not know port :9010.

this was a mistake in the docs - it didn't mention one needs to start with https
the error you get is when you try to access it over http

Follow me mode is not enabled by default. It can be turned on after opening frontend. There is an "edit mode" button on top of the screen. It opens a dialog to change the mode.
Regarding the spinning. It happened to me a few times that some wheel started moving after rae started. Usually it stopped after a while. Seems unrelated to the app, happened to me also when no app was installed. And it was very rare to happen, so I did not dig into that.

infinite-loup Is there a way to get FoxGlove/ROS 2.0 nodes to hook into RAE from another system?

yes on the same network it connects to ROS network/auto discovery as expected
its just not recommended to use the "Default App" for that
you can run the ROS stack within RobotHub Agent or without - doesn't matter - the README in rae-ros repo is not reflecting this correctly

infinite-loup I'm shocked that a device ostensibly meant to encourage hacking on robots via an open platform in 2023 would force users away from the open-standards-conformant Firefox in favor of Chrome.

There are technical reasons - where Firefox doesn't support VideoDecoder (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/VideoDecoder) which we need to decode H264 video frames coming from the device and draw them together with overlays.

infinite-loup RobotHub does not look like a real solution for interaction and development, at this point.

We are always open to suggestions; what feature are you missing in the RH platform?

Thanks,
Jaka

gregflurry

jakaskerl According to RobotHub, I am running FW Version Luxonis OS 1.12.

Based on the suggestion by @infinite-loup yesterday I uninstalled Default app v1.2.0 and installed v1.1.1 (and got to assign a device to it). 1.1.1 seemed like it might work, as I could switch between the front and rear cameras. I tried to go into control mode, and got a video stream, but when I tried to edit, everything crashed. Nevertheless that was progress.

I then uninstalled 1.1.1 and reinstalled 1.2.0; again I was able to assign a device. Pretty much nothing worked, but the log was quite a bit different, the OS was engaged, and the app seemed to try to do things, most of which seemed to succeed. But the app never really did anything worth. Trying control never got a stream. So, more failure.

After that, I uninstalled Default 1.2.0, and tried to install one of the other apps. I think I tried the Demo app first, it failed to install. Then I tried to install the Counter Beta. Currently my RAE is in state where the Demo app uninstalling and Counter app is pending install. That state is maintained for hours, and over multiple power off and back on. I even attempted a "reboot" by holding the power button down for 10 seconds, but that did nothing to fix the problem.

I have not yet done a reset, but I have no other options I at this time, or at least none I know about. Maybe I need to abandon RobotHub and connect directly, but I have no idea what to do with that either.

Fundamentally I am stuck with no path forward. I am very frustrated and disappointed. Is there any way to diagnose what is wrong with my RAE?

infinite-loup

jakaskerl Rae spins in circles when follow-me mode is enabled, which was introduced in 1.2.0. This just means the rae has not found a person to follow, so it tries to spin to find someone.

OK, but how did follow-me mode get enabled? All I did was install 1.2.0, and when it came up from the install, it started spinning and I had to catch it before it fell off my desk and onto a concrete floor. Is this the default mode? Did I miss some documentation? I have not been able to do anything with the device other than install apps, since the "Take Control" button just takes me to a blank page, so I didn't explicitly enable any modes of which I'm aware.

Is there a way to get FoxGlove/ROS 2.0 nodes to hook into RAE from another system? RobotHub does not look like a real solution for interaction and development, at this point.

jakaskerl

Hi gregflurry
RAE - Default app is the only app that is built with the necessary image to actually run on RAE. We will be building/porting more apps as we get the main issues and documentation sorted out. The firmware you installed on rae (I wouldn't recommend doing that since version names are very confusin atm) should be 1.12-rae. Make sure you didn't install the default luxonis OS. That one is only for the OAK devices.

Thanks,
Jaka

gregflurry

jakaskerl

Thanks. I can tell you what I've done and maybe you can provide additional advice. I know for certain I made no attempt to install firmware independently of anything the "normal get started" did for me.

This whole chain started because my RAE arrived totally discharged (I now see there is a warning about that). After charging and turning it on, I did exactly what the get started instructions tell me to do. My RAE eventually showed "Connected to RobotHub". I did the provisioning as shown in the associated video, and it seemed to work successfully. On the other hand, per an earlier post, the Default App was not properly configured.

Given your latest comments, comparing what I see for my robot does not match what I see in the video. This is a screenshot of my RobotHub (I am running in Safari if that makes a difference).

Note the line that says "FW version … Luxonis OS 1.12". The video suggests it should say "FW version … KeemBay 1.12". That suggests that provisioning loaded the wrong firmware. I repeat, I did not do anything explicit to load firmware. I've accessed my RAE solely through RobotHub, and the only explicit actions I'd done are to uninstall apps and install apps.

There is one other thing that suggests the wrong firmware got installed. The bottom of the "get started" page suggests https://<IP of RAE>:9010 gets you into a control program. I get a "server refused connection" error, so I suspect the firmware that is running does not know port :9010.

The screen shot also shows the corrupted state of my RAE. One app is theoretically uninstalling and the other is waiting to install. As you can tell from the CPU load, nothing is really happening. The RAE is effectively dead. I can do nothing with it.

Can you tell me how to fix these problems? At this point, the only thing I can speculate will work is to reset to the factory settings and then try connecting and provisioning again. But it seems that did not work the first time, so I'm leery of going through that for fear of destroying something else.

Or in theory, I could just have a broken device. HELP!

sskorol

infinite-loup I installed RAE OS, disabled RobotHub services, connected to RAE via USB, and pulled the latest docker image with ROS. There are still a number of issues, though. You can follow their repo for updates: luxonis/rae-ros. I'm waiting for SLAM and camera fixes. That's the most critical at this point.

BTW, you can check sskorol/rae-scripts for a quick start.

gregflurry

jakaskerl

Two things:

Can you tell me how to get out of the current "frozen" state shown in the screenshot I posted, where I have one app uninstalling (but not really) and another app waiting to be installed? I can't do anything with the RAE until I get out of that state. If I have to reset and start over, I'll do it, assuming now that the proper firmware does get provisioned.
I tried https://192.168.1.160:9010. I did apparently get to the RAE, more specifically the "RobotHub Agent". But I did not see anything in navigating around that would allow me to control anything. Perhaps this is related to the "frozen" state?

jakaskerl

Hi jakaskerl
Not really sure since that hasn't happened to me no matter how many times I tried. Basically for any error, just shutting down the device (double press) and powering it back up again solved it.
Keep in mind that neither of the apps you are using (uninstalling and pending) are actually supported on rae at this moment.

After a few minutes the first app was uninstalled and the second installed.

You are using the correct firmware, so if need be, you can factory reset the device.

Thanks,
Jaka