development

UPDATE: I’m leaving this series up for historical purposes, but please note that I no longer recommend Ubuntu Core or snaps for use in robotics. Some time ago I created a blog/video series that walked the reader through creating a prototype using the Robot Operating System (ROS) and taking it to production using Ubuntu Core. However, that series was intended more for robotics professionals; it assumed quite a bit of ROS knowledge, and required some costly equipment (the robot was about $1k)....

Tomorrow, it begins. The culmination of weeks of research, documentation, and preparation by multiple open-source projects, just waiting to start hacking away with students. Tomorrow, students aged 13-17 can begin participating in Google Code-in 2017. Ubuntu is one of the mentoring organizations, with several of my colleagues and me as mentors. Just in case you haven’t heard of it, Ubuntu is an open-source operating system for servers, desktops, and embedded devices....

My first foray into software development when I was a kid was as a web developer. I don’t admit this to many people, but the first language I ever learned halfway decently was PHP. I led a confused childhood. After that, though, I was introduced to Ruby on Rails, and I’ve been using it ever since. I don’t do web development professionally anymore, but I have a number of web-based side projects, making websites for friends or family....

I’m an engineer, and am pretty clueless when it comes to film-making. However, I’ve been asked by a few different people how I made the ROS prototype to production on Ubuntu Core video series. While I’m not deluding myself into thinking I’m a pro, I’m happy with how they turned out, and they were made on a shoestring budget with open-source software. This post is for those who are curious about what I did, what I used, and how I did it....

The officially-supported Ubuntu Phones run pretty old kernels. The Nexus 4 and BQ phones all run v3.4, and the Meizu MX4 runs v3.10. Device kernels typically lag a bit behind since so much effort goes into making them compatible with the hardware, but this posed a bit of a complication since the Click confinement model utilizes features of AppArmor v3, which isn’t even released yet. However, we like to push the envelope here at Canonical, so we backported it into our phone kernels anyway....