ROS2 weekend

[Charles Ihler]

I "learned something" this weekend. 

I installed ROS2 three times. I installed it on an i5 laptop (twice but for a purpose) and then on a Raspberry Pi 3B. Both went great and works fine through basic testing. Right off the bat I liked ROS2 over ROS1.

ROS2 will install on a Raspberry Pi 3B but I'd warn you that your node better be tiny. The installation went fine without any issues but it took me an hour and a half into compiling (colcon) the turtlesim workspace until the Pi ran out of memory and died. It worked okay with a basic ping/pong node... so I went on to build a rosserial test... but wait ROS2 doesn't have rosserial... of course it doesn't. I read they have no intention of porting it after someone came up with Micro-ROS ... okay that had potential EXCEPT for Micro-ROS takes up too much memory to fit on any 8-bit micro so they only have some support of ESP32 (didn't test) and STM microcontrollers. So ROS2 kills any chance you're running 8-bit standard Arduinos for interface unless you choose to build your own protocol-interface, etc. I did build a couple of the "my first node" examples... again it's much easier than ROS1 in my opinion. 

So... with that. I say so long ROS2. 

Back to CAN for PopBot. After about 20 hours of my life spent on ROS2 I switched back to focusing on putting the brains into the micros. I got PopBot rolling on one of three micros that now has an optional playstation wired remote for testing/demo today. I was going to use the wireless version but it's 2.4G and it already seemed kind of spotty in my house so probably a no-go at Robothon. 

I also took out the chassis for PopBot0.4 and cleared it down to barebones (frame/motors/driver) -- If I get 0.5 completed I'll work on 0.4 again--maybe see if someone wants to collaborate on it. 

Chas

[Robert R]

Hey Chas!

Thanks for the update, it's been a while! 

Bummer to hear about rosserial, that was something I really felt should have had tighter integration and support, not be cut from the project. Maybe it's a ROS2-is-big-boy-Ros kinda thing where they expect people to throw 5 figures at 32/64-bit industrial controllers or fpga's. Sucks for hobbyist.

For what it's worth, I found that regular ROS also eats up all the memory and crashes during compilation. I had to modify the make parameters from -j4 to -j2 to reduce the number of concurrent threads in order for it to complete. Still took an afternoon of impatient waiting while I really wanted to be playing with the software.

Good to hear things are moving forward! The last 6 months have been the busiest of my life, and we're about to close on our first house at the end of the month! Hopefully come Dec I'll be able to eek out a little self project time, but in the meantime, the job is continuing to build my python, RPi, circuit, pneumatic and systems skills.

Cheers!

Rob

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