Issues controlling the motor controller "Roboteq’s SDC2130" using ROS serial

Question

Hey guys, I need your perspective on the problem,I am facing. I tried to connect with the motor controller SDC2130(from Robotech). Here is the error,I am getting :

>>rosrun rosserial_python serial_node.py

[INFO] [WallTime: 1340943422.708854] ROS Serial Python Node [INFO] [WallTime: 1340943422.713271] Connected on /dev/ttyACM0 at 115200 baud [ERROR] [WallTime: 1340943424.826012] Failed to parse publisher: unpack requires a string argument of length 2 [ERROR] [WallTime: 1340943437.722695] Lost sync with device, restarting... [ERROR] [WallTime: 1340943437.733680] Failed to parse publisher: unpack requires a string argument of length 2

Is ros serial tuned to work only with arduino boards?. Do I need to interface the arduino board in order to use ros serial for communicating with the motor controller?. Please share your views. Thank you.

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Originally posted by metal on ROS Answers with karma: 174 on 2012-06-28

Post score: 0

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Original comments

Comment by danielq on 2013-04-18:
Hi guys, i' m trying to connect the same sdc2130 driver but I' m not an expert software developer so I'm not been able to write my own wrapper...any help how to modify the sdc2130 linux api and get it work? any help will be appreciated

Answer 1

rosserial needs some code to run on the embedded device to communicate with. The rosserial_arduino package has the necessary bits for this to work with Arduinos.

From the rosserial_python wiki page:

The rosserial_python package contains a Python implementation of the host-side rosserial connection. It automatically handles setup, publishing, and subscribing for a connected rosserial-enabled device.

I'm not sure, but from your description it seems like you expect rosserial to work with your SDC2130 without a client-side implementation, which, as you found out, won't work. It isn't clear from the documentation, but it doesn't seem like the SDC2130 can run anything other than its own firmware.

You could still write a ROS node that interfaces with the SDC2130 and communicates with it using its own protocol though (section 9 of User Manual.pdf).

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Originally posted by ipso with karma: 1416 on 2012-06-28

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 2

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Original comments

Comment by mjcarroll on 2012-06-30:
You may be able to use this Roboteq MDC2250 driver as a good starting point: https://github.com/GAVLab/mdc2250

Comment by metal on 2012-07-11:
thanks for the perspective guys. I created my own ros-wrapper using the linux-api created for the motor driver sdc2130.Now its on ROS.