cover image

Develop your snaps faster

Snaps bundle their dependencies, which take time to fetch and unpack, and they’re typically made up of multiple parts, each of which need to be built and installed into the snap. Once you finish this process, you need to install the snap and test it out. Once you notice that your code is terrible and doesn’t work the way you thought, you have to make a change and go back through that process again....

October 25, 2018 · 5 min · Kyle
cover image

Your first robot: Sharing with others [5/5]

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. This is the fifth (and final) blog post in this series about creating your first robot with ROS and Ubuntu Core. In the previous post we discussed methods of control, did a little math, and wrote the ROS driver for our robot. But it still required several nodes to be running at once, and sharing it with the world involved uploading your source code somewhere and convincing people to install ROS, build your package, and use it....

March 16, 2018 · 14 min · Kyle
cover image

Your first robot: The driver [4/5]

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. This is the fourth blog post in this series about creating your first robot with ROS and Ubuntu Core. In the previous post we worked on getting data out of the wireless controller and into ROS in a format meant for controlling differential drive robots like ours: the Twist message....

March 9, 2018 · 18 min · Kyle
cover image

Your first robot: The controller [3/5]

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. This is the third blog post in this series about creating your first robot with ROS and Ubuntu Core. In the previous post you were introduced to the Robot Operating System (ROS), and got your robot moving by ROSifying one of the CamJam worksheets. Today we’re going to move beyond the CamJam worksheets, and work toward having our robot remotely controlled by focusing on our wireless controller: getting data out of it and into ROS messages....

February 10, 2018 · 7 min · Kyle
cover image

Your first robot: Introduction to the Robot Operating System [2/5]

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. This is the second blog post in this series about creating your first robot with ROS and Ubuntu Core. In the previous post we walked through all the hardware necessary to follow this series, and introduced Ubuntu Core, the operating system for IoT devices. We installed it on our Raspberry Pi, and used it to go through the CamJam worksheets....

January 20, 2018 · 11 min · Kyle