>
> "anfederman@comcast" <
anfed...@comcast.net> Jun 17 09:28PM -0700
>
> OK never mind, I got it working (sort of). For rviz the fixed frame is
> 'neato_laser' and the topic is 'scan.' I am getting good data about a 1/3
> of the time and the rest of the time I get random confetti. Not sure if
> this is a speed, interface or screwy LDS. We can look at it during the
> SIG Wednesday. I am controlling the speed with an adjustable voltage
> regulator.
If the "confetti" is rings of points around the robot and then POIs that appear and disappear, your laser
might have version 2 firmware and the driver is trying to decode the data as version 1 packets.
The current version of the CWRU package has code to accept a "--firmware=" option on the command-line, but seemed to be hardcoded to version 1 firmware
regardless of the actual arguments you launch it with. I fixed my install to force it to use version 2 firmware and suddenly it all worked.
As for speed control, you can run "rostopic hz /scan" to see the frequency of the laser scans.
It should be around 5Hz. On a scale of 0-1024, I've found a PWM value of 850 gets me closest to that.
Right now I'm just doing an open loop approach where I have a Python script that gooses the motor via OSC PWM commands,
although I've looked at hacking into the xv11_laser publisher code and tapping into that to get frequency data and controlling the PWM that way.
I would need to dust off my C++ skills a bit, but otherwise it doesn't look too hard.
Ideally this should all be cleaned up and pushed up to the ROS gang because there seems to be a growing number of users that are using bare Neato lasers.
Let's talk more about this tomorrow night at the Builder's SIG meeting.
-----Steve " 'dillo" Okay