Program Robots Like a Boss
This Python ROS wrapper tutorial is the second post [2/4] of a series on how to create a ROS driver package. Make sure you have read the introduction [1/4] of this series, where I explain what is a ROS wrapper, and give some details about the driver we’ll use here. Note: after reading the introduction, … Read more
This is the first post [1/4] of a post series on how to create a ROS driver package. So, you have a piece of hardware, you wrote a driver for it, and now you want to interface it with ROS, in order to control it from the rest of your robotics application. In this post … Read more
In this tutorial I’ll show you how to write an Arduino String to the EEPROM memory, and then read it again. The EEPROM memory lets you save values on your Arduino board so you can retrieve them even after you reboot the board. This is very handy when you want to save some settings/data to … Read more
In this tutorial I’ll show you how to import a Python module from another package. ROS allows you to do that, and as you’ll see it’s quite simple. If you have a package which contains some common tools, helper functions, utils, or other stuff like that, you may want to be able to write the … Read more
In this tutorial I’ll show you how to communicate between a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino board via Serial communication. First, I’ll quickly explain what is Serial communication. Then you’ll see how to setup your hardware and software, and we’ll dive into the Python code (Cpp for Arduino). A basic example at first, leading to … Read more
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