Program Robots Like a Boss
What is the best package organization for your ROS stack? How can your better separate your code into different packages? Although there is no right answer to this question, and everyone is free to do what they think is best, I’ll try to give here some feedback from my own experience. I have analyzed what … Read more
So, you are using Arduino and you wonder if you can use the Cpp STL library in your code. The good news is: yes that’s possible! Even if some feature will still be lacking, or some others will be limited, you will be able to use things like std::vector and std::string in your Arduino programs. … Read more
So, you’ve developed a nice ROS application, which can be launched with a single launch file: great! But… There is still a problem. Actually you have to manually launch this file with a command line tool (roslaunch), and you wonder how you could make your application automatically start when you boot your computer… Or your … Read more
Raspberry Pi hardware permissions can be quite tricky. So, you are using hardware functionalities with your Raspberry Pi 4 (or 3B, 3B+), and always getting errors such as “Permission denied”? This might be the case if you use I2C, SPI, UART, or simply the GPIOs on the Pi, with a user that isn’t root. In … Read more
This tutorial is a practical guide on how to use rosparam command line tool to debug ROS Params. ROS params are really useful to launch your ROS application with different setup settings, without having to re-write and re-compile any part of your code. With the rosparam command line tool, you’ll be able to test your … Read more
In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create a ROS node outside a catkin workspace – both for Python and Cpp. Most of the post is dedicated to linking ROS libraries to a Cpp file, because as you’ll see it’s quite simple for Python. Why would you want to create a node outside of … Read more
This tutorial is a practical guide on how to use rostopic and rosmsg command line tools to debug a ROS topic. If you wonder how to monitor the publishers you’ve created, how to easily print the data from a topic, or even how to monitor a topic’s bandwidth, this post is for you. Through a … Read more
This tutorial is a practical guide on how to use rosservice and rossrv command line tools to debug a ROS service. You know those command line tools are useful, but it’s hard for you to really understand how to use them efficiently? Well, this tutorial is for you. I’ll show you step by step exactly … Read more
WiringPi is a Cpp library for Raspberry Pi. With this library you can use many of the functionalities provided by the GPIO header: digital pins, SPI, I2C, UART, etc. Although there are many Python libraries for Raspberry Pi GPIOs, Cpp is quite a bit behind. Fortunately, there is WiringPi. In this post you’ll install WiringPi, … Read more
In this tutorial I’ll show you how to use and compile WiringPi in your ROS Cpp nodes, so you can talk to hardware devices from your ROS application. Make sure to read this introduction to WiringPi before if you don’t know the library well. The WiringPi library is a great tool for Raspberry Pi (4, … Read more