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Optional — Remote access (Tailscale + NoMachine)

These are not required to run the robot. They are quality-of-life tools for working with the Pi 5 from another network or seeing the Ubuntu desktop without HDMI.

Tool What it does When you want it
Tailscale WireGuard-based mesh VPN — gives the Pi a stable address reachable from anywhere SSHing into the robot off your home LAN
NoMachine Low-latency remote desktop Driving rviz2 / GUI tools running on the Pi

If you only need SSH + rviz2 on the workstation, you can skip both.

Tailscale

Reference: https://tailscale.com/download/linux

curl -fsSL https://tailscale.com/install.sh | sh
sudo tailscale up

The CLI prints a URL — open it on the workstation to log into the same Tailscale account, and the Pi shows up in your tailnet. From then on, ssh <user>@<pi-hostname> works over Tailscale's mesh.

Pick the hostname you set with rpi-imager (or sudo hostnamectl set-hostname hacky-pi) — Tailscale's MagicDNS uses it.

NoMachine

Reference: https://download.nomachine.com/download/?id=30&platform=linux&distro=arm

Pick the arm64 build matching your Ubuntu (24.04 = arm64, not armhf). Example for v9.3.7:

# on the Pi
wget https://download.nomachine.com/download/9.3/Arm/nomachine_9.3.7_1_arm64.deb
sudo dpkg -i nomachine_9.3.7_1_arm64.deb

The installer drops nxserver into /etc/init.d/ and starts it. On the workstation, install the matching NoMachine client and connect to the Pi's Tailscale address (or LAN IP) on port 4000.

You'll need a real desktop session for NoMachine to attach to — if you installed ros-jazzy-ros-base instead of ros-jazzy-desktop, also install ubuntu-desktop-minimal first.

Security notes

  • Tailscale ACLs default to "all my devices can talk to each other." If you share a tailnet with other people, lock the Pi down with tags + ACLs.
  • NoMachine listens on port 4000 with password auth by default. If you expose it on a LAN with untrusted devices, switch to key auth in /usr/NX/etc/server.cfg and restart nxserver.