Hacker News Reader

Comment by leetrout | Hacker News Reader

I am building a very similar thing after a short stent at a robotics company in 2024. The industry is very far behind more general dev experience and tooling.

I am forced to accept the popularity of ROS but I find it to generally be a terrible experience. Are you considering an alternative? Have you used foxglove?

View on HN

Hey! Great to hear from someone in the same boat. I completely agree, the general dev experience and tooling around ROS can be deeply frustrating...

I am definitely looking into Foxglove! It seems to solve many of the transport/protocol headaches, but I feel like there's still a massive gap in how we actually interact with the robots day to day, especially when you are not glued to a desktop monitor.

I'd love to hear more about your experience. What specific part of the tooling drove you crazy enough to start building an alternative?

(Also, if you are open to a quick 15-min chat to share "war" stories, let me know!)

Would love to. My email is my username at gmail or my first name at my username dot com.

Foxglove is not the only name in town. There are many, Transitive Robotics, the company I'm building is one of them. Different from Foxglove we are much more focused on live-remote monitoring and control, e.g., we have a pretty popular remote teleoperation module: https://transitiverobotics.com/caps/transitive-robotics/remo... You can find all the other modules we're currently offering here: https://transitiverobotics.com/caps/ The platform itself is and remains open-source.

I will second this. You might not be able to get away without ROS compatibility depending on the market but a dependancy on it is a big pain in the neck from my point of view.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com