Send custom rostopic data from voxl to laptop using wi-fi

[frafrat]

Hello everyone,

by following the "Viewing the Data with ROS" section on "https://docs.modalai.com/voxl-tof-sensor-user-guide/", I am able to run "voxl_mpa_to_ros.launch" on the voxl and visualize several ros-topics on my laptop using rviz. In particular, I can easily visualize topics such as /tof_pc, /hires, /imu0 locally on my laptop.

As I am able to generate on the voxl another ros-topic such as /map, I would like to visualize it locally as well on my laptop for debugging purposes.

However, even if I can see the topic working on the voxl using "rostopic echo /map", I can only see the topic name on my laptop but as soon as I run "rostopic echo /map", no data is actually reported.

How can I send a topic from the voxl to my laptop using the wi-fi connection?

Thank you very much for your time,

[Chad Sweet]

voxl-portal is the most straight-forward tool to view data from VOXL. You just need a web browser and connection to the VOXL

[frafrat]

Thanks Chad for your quick reply. I just opened the voxl-portal in my browser and I can easily visualize the default topics related to cameras, point cloud, and the vox-mapper on map. However, I still can't see my custom topic.

How can I show my custom ros topic on the voxl-portal?

Thanks

[Chad Sweet]

voxl-portal doesn't display ROS data natively. You will have to work with the ROS community to visualize your custom ROS format. Maybe RViz is the right tool, it would depend on your data?

[frafrat]

Thanks for your reply Chad. My ROS-topic is in a standard format but I don't know how to visualize this topic on my laptop because the data is not sent from the voxl to my laptop. I can clearly run my ROS-topic on the voxl and see the data, but as soon as I try to do the same on my laptop, the topic is empty. It seems that the only ROS-topics data that can be visualized on the laptop are the ones that can be shown on the voxl-portal. Is there a way to transfer more ROS-topic data other than the one that can be visualized on the voxl-portal? I don't need to use the voxl-portal to visualize the data and rviz is just fine.

Thank you very much for your time and help

[Chad Sweet]

there is nothing special about the ROS implementation on VOXL. You might look at ROS networking documentation to debug