robotics

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....

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....

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)....

As of this writing there are two major versions of Snapcraft: v1 and v2. Snapcraft v1 creates snaps that target Ubuntu Core 15, and Snapcraft v2 creates snaps that target Ubuntu Core 16. Series 16 snaps are much more widely used, being supported not only in Ubuntu Core 16 but also classic Ubuntu Xenial (desktop and server) and more recently even Trusty! It’s also supported across a range of other Linux distributions....

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....