Program Robots Like a Boss
So, you’re using – or want to use – ROS on a Raspberry Pi. That’s great! ROS + Raspberry Pi is such a powerful combination to create smart robots, with a somehow low cost, and very small electronic board embedded in the robot. Although there are many advantages, there are also some limitations that you … Read more
This tutorial is an introduction to Arduino Firmata, with a focus on Standard Firmata. First I’ll explain to you when and why to use Firmata for Arduino. After that, you’ll see how to quickly setup Standard Firmata on your Arduino. And then you’ll create a client on your computer to actually communicate and give commands … Read more
In this tutorial I’ll show you how to install Raspbian Desktop on a virtual machine, and more specifically on VirtualBox. As you may know, Raspbian – derived from Debian – is the official operating system (OS) for Raspberry Pi boards. But… Raspbian is not only working on Raspberry Pi boards. You can actually install it … Read more
In this tutorial I’ll show you how to write a complete ROS Service on your Raspberry Pi. You’ll see how to create both sides of the ROS Service: the client and the server. Also, to make it more interesting, we’ll use the Raspberry Pi GPIO header to actuate real hardware (using interrupts). Here is the … Read more
In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create a ROS Python Subscriber on your Raspberry Pi. This is the direct following of how to create a ROS Publisher on Raspberry Pi. Please check out this previous tutorial first, before you continue. In the first tutorial you have seen how to read the state of … Read more
In this tutorial I’ll show you how to write a ROS Python publisher on your Raspberry Pi. With the following code example you’ll learn how to publish a GPIO state with ROS. For that we’ll use a simple push button with a minimal hardware setup. You’ll see all the steps, from setting up the environment, … Read more
In this tutorial I’ll teach you how to use GPIO interrupts on your Raspberry Pi, thanks to the RPi.GPIO library. You’ll see: Why and when you need interrupts. How to use interrupts in your programs. 3 working examples to practice on different situations. This tutorial works on Raspberry Pi 4 (and earlier, 3B, 3B+), with … Read more
In this tutorial I’ll show you how to remap a ROS topic. Remapping a topic means that you’ll change the topic name at run-time. If a node publishes on “topic1”, then you can make it publish on “topic2” instead, without having to change the code of the node. First things first, let’s understand why. Why … Read more
You want to include a Cpp header from another package in ROS, and don’t know how to do? Or you already tried and got a lot of compilation errors? Well, this tutorial is for you. I will start from scratch with a brand new custom library, build it inside a package, install it, and use … Read more
In this tutorial I’ll show you how to compute the duration of a part of code in Arduino. The notion of time/duration is super important when you program, especially on embedded systems like Arduino. Writing a code that takes too much time, and not being able to know it, can lead to severe problems in … Read more