Re: kobuki_ftdi quick question

[Daniel Stonier]

On Tue, May 24, 2016 at 3:03 AM, Bjorn Sorensen <bso...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Hello dear Stonier,

I am writing recipes and trying to port the Kobuki drivers to meta-ros (Yocto layer for ROS) in order to make it possible for myself and others to use the kobuki base on an OpenEmbedded linux. I have been facing a few problems getting the kobuki_ftdi to cross compile, (I also posted a reply to issues section).

Since the kobuki_node can be built without kobuki_ftdi, I simply removed it and created a test package. now kobuki_node runs on the embedded system but nothing happens with the robot. like there is no connection. Is this something related to the ftdi or that package is just good for creating udev rules and flashing, etc? do i HAVE to compile and build kobuki_ftdi for the PC --> Robot connection to work?

You don't need to compile anything in kobuki_ftdi to run. Compiling just builds some tools which let you read/flash the ftdi usb-serial chip. We flash that chip in the factory, so you do not need these.

What you do need is a udev rule which puts the kobuki device at /dev/kobuki. Check the troubleshooting section in the README.

Another thing you might like to do is disable the add_subdirectory(src) with a warning message if libusb or libftdi are not found. Although that may still not get you far since those are required in package.xml. Is libftdi unavailable on open embedded? We really need an architecture dependent way of expressing dependencies in package.xml. They've been recently talking about that on the ros mailing lists.

Daniel

.

I would really appreciate it if you get back to me.

Regards,

Bjorn.