As a continuation of 1PPM challange I dived into uncharted territories of web development (something I was actively trying to avoid throughout my life so far).

In this post I will briefly present my (only partially unwarranted) worries on web development as well as mention the courses I learned from and possible way forward.

My March 1PPM project significantly differs from all previous ones as I dedicated it to learning Robot Operating System (ROS).

The two books I almost read during this period are:

• Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming
• Programming Robots with ROS

In this post I will briefly describe my experience with aforementioned books (which in one particular case was quite short!)

Quite often I found myself needing static device names in Linux, especially when using ROS. As an example imagine having two sensors of a same type that yo connect to your PC. Now, if you don’t map your ports in any way you might end up with devices being mapped to /dev/ttyACM0 and /dev/ttyACM1, depending which one was connected first.

Let’s say your sensors are at different positions on the robot. If you want to make sure that you are using the proper device in your code you can either:

1. Unplug and plug back the sensors again until you get the names you want
2. Assign a static name to a port and be done with it

If you want to learn about the option 2 then read on.

Otherwise keep playing with your cables!

I consider the second and final part of the falcon project as finished from 1PPM perspective. Most of the project I already described in the previous post

Short summary of achieved results:

• All the work done and test for Px4 SITL(jmavsim)
• Mavros is used to talk to pixhawk (or SITL in this case)
• Falcon is not suitable for flying real models (it isn’t reliable enough)

Without further due, here is the video showing the proof of concept in action:

Want to know more about the project? Read on!

For the last two months I’ve been using 3 tools to effectively work with the terminal on Linux. In this post I’ll try to sum up my experience so far and show you all the tools that I’m using at the moment.

In the post I will add some commands that I find useful everyday. Please bare in mind that in 2 months I barely scratched the surface of both vim and tmux.

As my first 1PPM project I choose to explore possibilities of using a Novint Falcon haptic device as a high level controller for an UAV. In this post I will describe the tools I chose to solve the problem.

Tl;dr of things I learned while working on this project:

• Bit of ROS (Robot Operating System)
• Using libnifalcon library to interface with the falcon
• Some random bits about Pixhawk (Px4 and ArduCopter Firmware)

ROS industrial for ROS Kinetic distribution is on the verge of being released. If you are like me and are anxious to test it out but can’t wait until is available on PPAs then read on, I will show you how to make ROS industrial work with Kinetic distro!