Ros on windows

Posted by: @mjwhite

Yes, I have the visualization tools running on my Pi.  It's part of the install.  They're a little slower but still perfectly workable.  I'm sure the Pi 4 will be much better

I have some pretty antiquated stuff.  Including my Internet connection.  I'm currently downloading "Raspbian Buster with desktop".  It's taking over an hour to download.   It has 35 minutes left to go.   I'm currently running an older version of Raspbian on my Pies.  It's Raspbian version 7 called "wheezy".  I already have that OS image on my computer but thought I might try the newer version of Buster.

I don't even know if I'll want to use ROS.   It would be nice to learn as much as I can about it, but if it proves to be too big of a pain to just get set up for I might be discouraged rather quickly.    I already have a robot architecture planned that doesn't include ROS.   The only place I can see where it might be required in the future is when I try to use advanced features of something like a Jetson Nano.   And I'm not even sure if I'll actually need it for that.  I certainly don't need it for motion control and sensors on my robot.  I already have all of that taken care of.

I'm also wondering how ROS would be used to replace what Bill has done on the DB1 with his motor control set-up.   He has a Mega talking to two Nanos via I2C, so he already has the communications set-up between these devices.  How would ROS be used to do that?  It would seem to me that you would need to have ROS software (at least in-part) on both Nanos and on the Mega.  And then how would they communicate if not via I2C?

It would seem to me that in this situation the simple I2C communication is far more efficient actually.   No need for ROS, that would only complicate things to an unnecessary degree I would think.   So I'm kind of going out on a limb here spending time and resources learning about ROS when I'm not even sure if I'll ever actually need it.  I mean, it's always good to learn things.   But at 70 years old I really don't have the luxury of learning about things I might never use.

I'm thinking it might be useful for higher-level stuff like communicating with the Jetson Nano in terms of facial recognition, etc.   Although I'm not even sure if it would be necessary for that.

So you'll have to excuse me for being in a state of limbo here.   It's just hard to know whether something is worth investing time and energy into when I'm not even sure where, or when, I might use it.

@robo-pi

I totally get it.  ROS is definitely not a requirement and you can certainly do a lot of robotics without it.  It's a big learning curve so you have to decide if it's worth while for the projects that you intend to do.  

The main place I would hope ros would come into play is in using the camera and lidar to their full potional.

Posted by: @mjwhite

I totally get it.  ROS is definitely not a requirement and you can certainly do a lot of robotics without it.  It's a big learning curve so you have to decide if it's worth while for the projects that you intend to do.  

Well, I'll go ahead and start with this learning process and see where it leads.   I'm re-learning about my Raspberry Pies anyway.  I wanted to set one up from scratch so I can re-learn how to do it.  I do everything headless so there's a special procedure for that I wanted to refine. 

Posted by: @starnovice

The main place I would hope ros would come into play is in using the camera and lidar to their full potional.

That's what I'm thinking too.  But without knowing what it takes to do those things I can't know ahead of time whether ROS would be needed or not.  I would like my robot to be able to recognize individuals by their face.  Not sure if that's even possible.  There are two types of facial recognition. 

Type one:  Just recognize that a face exists.  You can even trick the system buy holding up a smiley face picture in front of the camera.  That can be useful, but not as good as type two.

Type Two: Be able to not only recognize faces, but to be able to distinguish between specific people.  In the end I would like my robot to be able to recognize people and call them by name.  I think that would be so cool.  Not sure if a Jetson Nano can do that?

@dronebot-workshop

Yes I flashed unbuntu to it also you can get SD cards with these already on them but I was unaware of this at the time however duce robot is a complicated project I guess its fitting it has a complicated system lol I'm going to try this also thanks

@twobits

I'm using a panda with windows 10 on board duce robot to run ros its compatible with arduino ide that frees up the raspberry pi to run octoprint for Duce's 3d printer we will see how that pans out

@dronebot-workshop

The ros system I think will be important for this project I posted a video on YouTube that was to big for the forum under wish I could arduino duce robot build for forum users only is ros right for this project ? I think but I'm not 100% sure .

This thread gathered some interest. In this post and a related thread on creating a standard base, I made several opinion statements about what I feel is a good way to get started with ROS. To help reduce confusion I would like to take the time to write a proper article clarifying how I came to those opinions.

In the meantime... I am not trying to convince anyone how to use ROS or even if they should use ROS on their project.

I am looking at the situation as a person who has no physical access to a ROS class and only has a limited amount of time to dedicate to learning robotic. What steps can I take to increase the likelihood of learning something interesting?

I hope to have a satisfactory follow up soon.

I'm all set to go here. ?  Today, in-between cutting logs into lumber I managed to download a the "Raspbian Buster with Desktop" for the Raspberry Pi.   It's about 1.1 GB as a zip file, and about 3.7 GB as a system image.  It took my slow internet speed over an hour to download this.  I cut a whole log into lumber while that downloaded.

Then I had to burn the image to an SD card and boot it up.  I connected with the Raspberry Pi via Putty using an Ethernet cable.  From there I was able to set up the WiFi using radpi-config.   And I also installed xrdp or Remote Desktop on the Pi.  Finally I changed the hostname to Experimental-Pi.   Then I was able to connect to the Raspberry Pi using my notebook computer, Remote Desktop and WiFi.

So I'm all set up and ready to go.  I feel pretty good about having done this so easily because I remember when I first bought these this set-up process was a nightmare.  Funny how experience really pays off.

I was also glad to discover that the "Raspbian Buster with Desktop" (and without the recommended software packages) include the Chromium Web Browser, Geany, and Thonny Python IDE.   So it actually comes with quite a bit of software.  Not bad at all.  I'm happy.

In fact, I'm so happy I feel like sharing a picture of the desktop.   Cool. ? 

I'll make a back up of this system CD just so I won't need to redo the Remote Desktop configuration again.  Now I have a system card that I can just pop into any Raspberry Pi and I'm already up and running headless with Remote Desktop and WiFi.   This is nice.  I'm happy.

Now I'm ready to install ROS on a brand new empty Raspberry Pi system card. ? 

Posted by: @robo-pi

Now I'm ready to install ROS on a brand new empty Raspberry Pi system card.

I've been reading up on how to install ROS on a Raspberry Pi.    Apparently ROS is extremely picky.  From what I understand thus far ROS will only run (without a lot of problems) on Ubuntu.   It also appears to be hardware dependent and won't run on my older Raspberry Pi cards.   It also appears to have a ton of problems when it comes to running on Windows.

To be quite honest ROS is a little bit too picky for me.  For one thing I'm not about to buy a brand new Raspberry Pi just to try out ROS.  And for another thing I don't think I want to build a robot that will  be dependent on all the limitations ROS has.  

I certainly don't mean to be a nay-sayer.  But ROS simply doesn't look to be very inviting to me.  It appears to be more hassle than it's worth.   I would basically need to have a situation where no other solutions are possible before turning to ROS.   As far as I can see ROS is a last resort that I hope I never need to turn to. 

So I'll have to pass on doing any ROS experiments.   If other people are doing them I'll read their threads and see what they are doing.  I'm not about to buy new hardware and be stuck with only using Ubuntu just to run ROS.  That appears to me to be a wrong-turn that I definitely do not what to make.   I'll wait until they improve ROS to the point where it doesn't have so many dependencies.

Posted by: @starnovice

The main place I would hope ros would come into play is in using the camera and lidar to their full potional.

I just came from a Jetson Nano forum board.  According to them we won't need ROS to interface with the Jetson Nano.   So if you are planning on using a Jetson Nano for the camera and lidar you won't need ROS for that.   In fact, the interface for that will be extremely simple.   So as far as I can see I don't have anything in my plans that would even require ROS. 

Edited to add.  They suggested communicating with the Jetson Nano via one of the following methods:

1. Ethernet cable
2. Serial
3. SPI
4. I2C

@Robo Pi

I'm probably sceptical of ROS at the moment similar to you, but likewise I follow the story with interest.   I think it will all hinge around:

1. Implementations – Many modules have been written to do common tasks. These modules range from ‘drivers’ which enable you to plug your favorite sensor into ROS to complex modules to do Localization and navigation for you.

On a robot with many sensors to read and integrate into a coherent whole theres a lot of cleaver coding to be done.  I think this could actually take many months to do and interests than robots tug at ones sleeve.  Of course coding is part of the fun, but so is getting the robot doing what a robot should do.   I can't devote too much time to my robot at the moment and I had hopes you were going to give ROS a go so I could piggy back of your endeavours ?  

I think the hardest part about ros is getting it started once initiated you will learn the basics and build from that point start with turtle bot and expand as far as ai and the nano that itself is still on the cutting edge I'll be happy with turtle bot for now?

Posted by: @byron

I had hopes you were going to give ROS a go so I could piggy back of your endeavours  

I was going to give it a shot.  But from what I've read the first thing I would need to do is buy a whole new Raspberry Pi.   According to what I've read ROS doesn't run well on earlier versions of the Raspberry Pi boards.   And then there's the problem with it not being Windows friendly, etc, etc, etc.  

It's just gotten to the point where there are too many straws on this camel's back.   I didn't want to go that far out of my way to learn ROS.  I thought I could just load it onto a normal Raspberry Pi running Raspbian, but from what I've read that's not going to work.   So I'll just watch what others are doing from afar. ?