Tony is a Geek

Continuing my ongoing quest to see if I can get anything from ROS2 and a small Lidar device ( I just found a YT video of a very young person, maybe 12? that, of course, got this working using Rviz2 in about 8minutes, pfhh... guess my technical days are numbered?! ) However, not to be deterred, I am choosing to do this the "hard way", ie. I want to see RAW data, I want to see the values being spat out of the Lidar, I want to see the numbers - I then want to record that or process it on the fly - yes, I know that RViz2 will do that, but I want to be able to use it for some autonomous sensor usage, ie. make the thing self-drive & navigate.  Maybe I should search YT to follow another 12year old that has already done that already? Anyway, I suppose it's a bit like sitting on a couch in your socks & pants, eating biscuits, watching p0rn on the TV, saying, "yeah, I can do that", "that's easy, anyone can do it" - but IRL, it's somewhat more com...

Because I so love repeating myself - I really don't, trust me, but I tend to end up doing that - a lot! I've decided to "start again" with the Waveshare UGV Rover. "why?" because, that's why.  well, I've been around the houses with this thing so many times that I've lost track of how to reproduce the state of where I'm at & how to recreate.  Also, for some odd reason I managed to break the installation that I had in place and I couldn't get any imagery from the camera. hmmm... not sure what I broke, or if indeed it was actually me & not an update? Anyway, so here I am again, going back through a "start from scratch" install & setup.  This time I thought, "y'know, I'm gonna f**k this up a few times, I best document the steps so I can run through it faster the next 5 times I do this" :-) First step.  Get the waveshare .img file - that saves LOADS of time, basically it is Raspberry Pi 5 OS (Bookworm) w...

Okay, so after wasting a LOT of time going around in circles? ( Which does make me wonder how far & how not-far (!far), we've actually come in the IT Industry, we seemed to have peaked in the mid/late 1990s/early 2000s & then seemed to have gotten stuck & repeated ourselves and gone in a downward spiral - wow, I really do sound like a Gen-X-er! which I am, so get over it )  I often confess I'm no genius, I just keep trying different positions to put the square block into the circle hole repeatedly, until I either wear down the sides of the square or I make the circle more square - such is life :-) What has this got to do with ROS2.  Well, I thought this was going to be a 10minute job, super simple & I could move onto the "good stuff" and do something useful with my time.  Over the years, I have learnt that I tend to spend the time between xmas & new year just doing "installs & setups", I rarely actually get to the point where I "...

To some people this information maybe old hat - if however, like me you've been a little busy for the past, well, the past "while" and have only just gotten back to your RPI4 projects, then this might be news to you - and if it is, I'll save you some "Googling"....  First of all, the RPi4 has been in short supply since the pandemic, so that was the first reason this has taken me so long to get around to, but alas I did indeed end up getting my RPi4 from pimoroni or was it thepihut ?, either one is a great place to know about. I purchased this little, well they call it a dog, but the head/ears make it look more like a cat to me, so I shall refer to it as a robot cat from now on. https://github.com/Freenove/Freenove_Robot_Dog_Kit_for_Raspberry_Pi I put it all together, connected all the servos, did all the wiring etc..etc... and then I did put an RPi3 on it I believe to initially set it up.  I got the basics working from the github repo supplied python code. ...

Well.....I seem to have made "some" progress...of sorts.  I've managed to get the turtlebot3 software running correctly on the robot itself.  I have a Virtual Ubuntu 20.04 machine running ROS2 foxy edition and using all the OOTB stuff it seems to be behaving itself. I have created a map using SLAM and used the Navigator2 to click around and get the turtlebot3 to plot a course and move around avoiding obstacles as well as "new" obstacles, like the cat suddenly appearing in front of it.  It seems to handle it well. ( A bit like a certain "Routing Widget v2.1" ;-) ) However...moving over into the ROS2 coding side of things, I had to go back into refresher-land for a day or two (I really do recall doing all of this back in 2017/2018, the memories are still there!). If I do a direct call from the command-line: ros2 topic pub --once /cmd_vel geometry_msgs/msg/Twist "{linear: {x: 2.0, y: 0.0, z: 0.0}, angular: {x: 1.0, y: 0.0, z: 1.8}}" publisher: b...