ModalAI Forum

@Zachary-Lowell-0 Sorry for the late response! Apologies if that was confusing. Yes, the latter: I am trying to stream ros2 packets from the voxl2 to my computer. They are connected to the same WiFi network, and my computer can see the list of mpa-to-ros topics created by the voxl2 when I do "ros2 topic list", but it can't actually echo the data being published. In terms of setup, I was under the impression that with ros2, the two devices (the voxl2 and the computer) just have to be connected to the same network (in this case, WiFi), and then I should be able to stream data without issue.

The raspberry pi was to provide a sanity check. Instead of streaming the voxl2's ros2 data to my computer, I tried doing it with a simple ros2 node on the pi. When using the pi, my computer was able to see the ros2 topic data just fine. The idea there was the same as with the voxl2 + my computer; my computer and the pi were on the same WiFi network but with the pi I could stream ros2 data to my computer without a hitch. So I think something's wrong with how my voxl2 is configured to stream ros2 topic data, but I'm not sure what it is.

Hey there! I was the author of this post a few weeks back. I failed to read thermal camera data using the voxl-mpa-to-ros node (in ROS1) and @Zachary-Lowell-0 replied with a fix implemented in ROS2. I pulled that fix and installed ROS2 on my VOXL2 Sentinel platform, and I can now read uvc camera data from the /uvc topic without error. Yay!

However, now when I try to echo/subscribe to any voxl-mpa-to-ros topic data on my remote laptop using a shared WiFi connection, the data isn't streaming on my laptop's end. I can both ping my laptop from the VOXL2 and ping the VOXL2 from my laptop, so they definitely see each other. Furthermore, when I do "ros2 node list" on my laptop, I can see the voxl-mpa-to-rose node is running, and doing "ros2 topic info <topic_name>" on my laptop also gives me the correct info for the voxl-node's topics.

To make sure it wasn't some issue with my laptop's network configuration, I set up a basic ROS2 publisher node on a Raspberry Pi and checked that I could receive topic data on my laptop, and this worked seamlessly. So the VOXL2 specifically doesn't seem to properly stream ROS topic data over the network, and I can't figure out why. It's not specific to the voxl-mpa-to-ros node either because I also tried a basic publisher on the VOXL2 and I still can't see the data on my laptop. Is there a ROS2 network setup step I'm missing for the VOXL2? How can I go about identifying what's wrong?

EDIT: I'll also mention the version of ROS2 I am using for every hardware platform mentioned is Foxy

Hi @Zachary-Lowell-0,
Thanks for the support! Will the PR be available over GitHub? I will look into ROS2 in the meantime.

Hey there,

I have a Sentinel drone equipped with a VOXL2 onboard (running Ubuntu 18 + ROS Melodic). I also have a FLIR Lepton 3.5 thermal camera plugged into the VOXL2 via a USB connection. I can RTSP stream the Lepton's camera data from the VOXL2 to QGroundControl on my laptop when I run the voxl-uvc-server (with the proper parameters), but when I run the voxl_mpa_to_ros node and echo or subscribe to the /uvc topic to get the camera data, the ros node crashes with this error:

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::bad_alloc'
what(): std::bad_alloc
[voxl_mpa_to_ros_node-2] process has died [pid 2409, exit code -6, cmd /opt/ros/melodic/lib/voxl_mpa_to_ros/voxl_mpa_to_ros_node __name:=voxl_mpa_to_ros_node __log:=/home/root/.ros/log/5567d258-c2e7-11ee-a3cf-00c0cab38e43/voxl_mpa_to_ros_node-2.log].
log file: /home/root/.ros/log/5567d258-c2e7-11ee-a3cf-00c0cab38e43/voxl_mpa_to_ros_node-2*.log