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Development Environment Setup

Prerequisites

Note: If you do not wish to use vagrant, you can instead run the vagrant-scripts/bootstrap.sh script on a clean Ubuntu Focal Fossa installation (you have to do minor changes to the script)

Note: after creating the machine, you will have to enable the USB controller in VM settings manually

If you are not familiar with git, take a look at this tutorial: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/git/index.htm

Fork this repository and do your development there.

Remember to git commit your changes and push them to remote after every development session.

At the end of the project, create light documentation for your ROS package in english (document code, what dependencies it requires, how it should be used, how it integrates with ROS and does it require more development to be usable) in markdown.

Environment setup with vagrant

Install Vagrant

Vagrantfile is provided for setting up the ROS development environment. Do not store anything important in the guest. The guest is only meant for building and testing the ROS nodes. The vagrant syncs the repository (workspace) directory to ~/SOP-Robot directory in the guest.

To provision the guest (you may have to set the provider manually):

vagrant up --provider=virtualbox

Provisioning the machine for the first time can take up to 1 hour, because after vagrant has set up the box it will install everything listed in ansible-scripts/playbook.yml. In the meantime, download VSCode and checkout the remote development feature mentioned below. If you are using HyperV on Windows as hypervisor, you may have to enable smb direct in Windows features to be able to mount smb shares.

Now test that the provision succeeded, so vagrant ssh into the guest and run ls, you should be see the following output:

PS C:\projects\SOP-Robot> vagrant ssh
vagrant@vagrant-ros:~/SOP-Robot $ ls
2  config  docs  img  launch  Makefile  README.md  scripts  sop-robot.code-workspace  src  vagrant  Vagrantfile  vagrant-scripts

The easiest way to setup development environment for the ROS packages is to use the SSH Remote Development feature in Visual Studio Code and to do the development inside the guest machine using this feature.

Follow this tutorial to setup the remote development on your host machine and the instructions below to setup the remote connection to your vagrant guest machine:

  1. Use vagrant up to bring up the guest machine If something would fail on the way run vagrant provision until it runs thru sucessfully
  2. Use vagrant ssh-config >> ~/.ssh/config to export the ssh-config
    • IMPORTANT! Confirm that the file encoding is UTF-8 without BOM, especially if you are on Windows! VSCode shows the file encoding in the bottom-right corner. Convert the encoding if necessary.
  3. Open Remote-SSH: Connect to Host in VSCode
  4. Select vagrant-ros
  5. Select Linux
  6. Open the ~/SOP-Robot directory (you will enter this folder automatically when you run vagrant ssh)
  7. Install whatever extensions you want to use on the guest
    1. For Python development, follow this tutorial
    2. For C++ development, install C++ extension (confirm that includePath is set correctly). This and this tutorials may help.

Note: you may have to do recursive git clone (git submodule update --init --recursive) and run: rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro foxy -r -y after vagrant up, if the shared folder was not mounted correctly during vagrant up.

Additionally, if you lose the files of git submodules (dynamixel-workbench and dynamixel-workbench-msgs) you can get them back with git submodule update --init --recursive.

About Virtualbox setup

When using vagrant virtualbox provider, the GUI should pop up when executing vagrant up. With virtualbox you can also just start the VM from virtualbox GUI.

After the VM is created, remember to add USB device filters for the USB devices you are using with the robot in the VM settings (e.g., webcam, servo controller). Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager -> Select the created VM -> Settings -> USB -> Check the 'Enable USB Controller' box and choose USB 3.0 Controller -> Add filters for devices using the '+' button. Devices might not always automatically connect to VM even the filters are configured. You can connect them manually from the menu bar. Devices -> USB -> and you will get the list of usb devices. Just select one of them and Virtualbox attaches it to the VM. Tick appears next to the device when it is attached.

Note: The Ubuntu in VM defaults to US keyboard layout. You can change the layout from Ubuntu's options.

Note: if your VM GUI freezes on resize, try changing the virtual machine graphics controller in the VirtualBox settings to VMSVGA

Note: If you have Hyper-V activated on Windows Host and decide to use Virtualbox as a hypervisor, Virtualbox will run very slowly. More information on virtualbox forum and here.

Create ROS package

  1. Open VSCode remote development session
  2. cd into src/ and use ros2 pkg create as described here
    • For Python, ros2 pkg create --build-type ament_python --node-name <my_node_name> <my_package_name>
    • For C++, ros2 pkg create --build-type ament_cmake --node-name <my_node_name> <my_package_name>

Note: Package node name cannot contain hyphen (setup.py entrypoint). If it does, the package compilation fails!