Blink LED Example on an ESP32 Using MicroPython and ROS2

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6 points·jackp510··4 comments

It is surprisingly hard to find out what this "ROS 2" thing is. It appears to stand for "robot operating system". The tutorial talks about "interfacing with ROS 2" from your ESP32 microcontroller, or rather from code you run on your microcontroller.

So I am guessing that it is a firmware system preloaded and running on microcontrollers built into robot hardware that your own code, running on your microcontroller, sends commands to, and collects reports from.

Achieving a blinking LED is a good start for working out the mechanics of getting code compiled, downloaded into your microcontroller, and running, but I would really rather that tutorials took it a step further and got the LED blinking under control of interrupt service routines triggered by hardware timer events. That is where you need to get to actually start doing real-world embedded-system programming.

@ncmncm Thx for the comment. Yes ROS 2 is the robot operating system v2 - www.ros.org - which is historically a challenge to interface with uC's, hence the post share. I'm trying to build a cheap platform for people to learn ROS (2) and robotics hence the interest in using cheap (yet capable) uC's like the ESP32.

The example actually does use HW timers to blink the LED from a ROS message.

Let me know if you have other suggestions.

Thank you, I did not pick up that the example used HW timers. That alone makes it much better than typical tutorials.

This is really a very helpful document, and not just for setting up an ROS controller.

+1. Please don't hesitate to reach out - jack AT hadabot DOT com - with other questions.

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