Preserve the Factory Baseline Before Modifying It
Once the robot was assembled and reachable, the temptation was to immediately start replacing vendor software.
I decided not to.
The better first milestone is a known-good, recoverable baseline.
My rule became:
Understand and preserve the reference system before destroying the reference system.
That means checking the major hardware and software paths while the robot is still close to the factory configuration:
- drive system
- robotic arm
- LiDAR
- camera
- display
- Jetson
- robot controller
- networking
- battery telemetry
- ROS nodes and topics
- packages and launch files
- TF relationships
I started inspecting the ROS 2 environment directly with tools such as ros2 node list, ros2 topic list, and package/launch-file searches rather than simply running vendor demos.
One small but useful confirmation was battery telemetry. I observed /battery readings around 11.05 V before charging and about 12.30 V later after charging. That was an early example of physical state becoming software-visible state through ROS.
Backup before experimentation
After the component tests are complete, I want a full recoverable image of the Jetson storage—not only a copy of a workspace.
The goal is to preserve the original Linux, NVIDIA software, drivers, ROS environment, vendor packages, and system configuration so that later experiments can be reversed.
The intended cycle is simple:
known-good baseline
↓
full-system backup
↓
experiment
↓
break something
↓
understand why
↓
recover if necessary
This also supports the security goal I had before purchase. I can preserve the vendor reference environment while still moving gradually toward a system whose packages, services, and network behavior I understand.
Remote access is infrastructure too
SSH was usable, but I also encountered ownership/permission issues while improving the authentication setup. That was another reminder that robot engineering still includes ordinary platform engineering: Linux permissions, identity, networking, deployment, and recovery matter before autonomy becomes useful.