Building ROS2 Nodes

Overview

Note: This is only meant to be done on VOXL2

VOXL2 ships with the voxl-utils and ROS2 FOXY pre-installed on target.

You can choose to compile ROS2 nodes either directly on-target (on VOXL2), or in the qrb5165-emulator docker on a host PC and then push the compiled application onto the VOXL2 (see voxl-emulator for more info).

Building on VOXL2

1) ADB or ssh into VOXL and go to your VOXL2’s home directory. This assumes you have followed the previous setup pages in this manual to get ADB and/or ssh working.

me@mylaptop:~$ adb shell

...

voxl2:/$ cd ~/
voxl2:~$ 

3) make a new colcon workspace

voxl2:~$ mkdir -p colcon_ws/src
voxl2:~$ cd colcon_ws

4) Make a new node source directory in the src folder. Here we use the PX4’s px4_ros_com and PX4’s px4_msgs

voxl2:~/colcon_ws$ cd src
voxl2:~/colcon_ws/src$ git clone https://github.com/PX4/px4_ros_com --recursive
voxl2:~/colcon_ws/src$ git clone https://github.com/PX4/px4_msgs --recursive
voxl2:~/colcon_ws/src$ cd ../
voxl2:~/colcon_ws$

5) Build!

voxl2:~/colcon_ws$ colcon build

6) This will build out the px4_ros_com ROS2 node as well as the px4_msgs required by this node. It will take about 3 minutes to finish compiling. Once finished compiling - you will want to source the install directory created from build. This contains all the path setups.

voxl2:~/colcon_ws$ source install/setup.bash

7) Now you can run your new ROS2 node!

voxl2:~/colcon_ws$ ros2 run px4_ros_coms px4_ros_coms

8) This can be done in the qrb5165-emulator as well. Just follow the same steps above in this demo and once compiled - adb push the install and build folders created in the ~/colcon_ws/ directory to your colcon_ws on target (VOXL2).