This doesn't help with your core issue, but I have had success running the ROS2 docker images on RaspiOS on a pi: https://docs.ros.org/en/foxy/How-To-Guides/Installing-on-Raspberry-Pi.html If you're comfortable running your software inside a Docker container, that'll solve your problem. Conveniently, you can also build a docker file for ARM or for X86, so you can run the same software on a more traditional PC or inside a CI pipeline.

I also recently noticed that there is still an officially supported Ubuntu image for the Pi. I haven't tried it, but it might be another option. If you have a spare SD card, you could install ubuntu on the spare card, then see if that works for you. Then if it doesn't work you can just go back to the old SD card.

Yes you should format the SD card with ext4 file system for best performance. You can do it either on VOXL using standard command line tools or it may be easier for you to do it on a Linux Desktop using a disk manager with a GUI.

I just did a quick test and inserted a SD card into VOXL1 with Raspberry Pi OS installed on the SD card. Here is output of dmesg . It has mounted automatically :

[   24.125295] SELinux: initialized (dev mmcblk0p1, type vfat), uses genfs_contexts
[   24.127560] EXT4-fs (mmcblk0p2): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null)
[   24.127611] SELinux: initialized (dev mmcblk0p2, type ext4), uses xattr

and

# ls /mnt/sdcard/
bin   etc	  initrd.img.old  media  proc  sbin  tmp  vmlinuz
boot  home	  lib		  mnt	 root  srv   usr  vmlinuz.old
dev   initrd.img  lost+found	  opt	 run   sys   var

also

/ # df
Filesystem     1K-blocks    Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root        2837860 1927412    894064  69% /
...
...
/dev/mmcblk0p2  60253244 5259876  51913512  10% /mnt/sdcard

(this is the contents of the ext4 partition, the card is 64GB)

Please keep in mind that not all SD cards are the same, if you want good performance, please consider selecting a high quality SD card. You should do your own research, but there are many sites comparing SD card performance, like this one : https://www.cameramemoryspeed.com/reviews/micro-sd-cards/

Based on my research, Lexar SD cards are one of the best brands. For data logging you want to have the fastest sustained write speed and also I/O speed because there could be many logging operations happening per second.

https://docs.modalai.com/voxl-logger/
https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/utilities/voxl-logger

Once you become familiar with voxl-logger, you can do some tests to see how much data per second is being generated and whether the target medium (built-in EMMC, or SD card or external SSD) can sustain that bandwidth. If not, you can always adjust your scenario either by reducing frame rate of cameras or resolution.

I think that first you need to make a list of all the data that you need to collect and in what format. This will tell you the required storage throughput (MB/s).

I do not recommend using ROS for storing large data sets with raw images because there can be a lot of overhead with message packaging / passing. The exact approach to storage of the data will depend on how much data you need to store (per second).

You have easy options like the built-in EMMC storage, the external SD card (which could be larger than 32GB. This spec says up to 2TB is supported, although i personally have not tested such large SD cards : https://docs.modalai.com/voxl-datasheets-functional-description/#storage

If you wanted faster and larger storage (SSD), your best bet is USB3 to SSD adapter, see some details here about USB3 cable : https://docs.modalai.com/voxl-as-usb-host/

Hopefully this helps! please let us know if you have additional questions.

Alex