Setting Up Our Development Environment!!!

Parts are arriving daily! Soon we can begin connecting the basic sensors and start getting actual readings. Our goal over this week was to get our development environment setup so we can start reading sensor data on the Arduino Pro Mini.

Sensors1

Environment Setup

Virtual Machine (VM)

We need a development environment that can be isolated from our workstation without being burdensome. A good tool that satisfies this requirement is a virtual machine. Software is capable of emulating hardware, allowing for sand-boxed operating systems within your current workstation. There are several vendors of virtual machines but I normally stick with Oracle VM VirtualBox due to already being familiar with the software. Once installed, we can download an operating system image and use it to install a fresh version on the VM so we can begin to setup our dev environment.

Operating System (Ubuntu)

In order to utilize the VM, we will need an operating system to run. In this series, I will use Ubuntu version 16.04 as it is recommened for some of our third party libraries. Install Ubuntu onto an instance of a VM and follow the on screen instructions. After some time, the software will be installed and we can move on to the next step.

IDE (Arduino)

Our programs need to run on the Arduino Pro Mini and Raspberry Pi Zero. In order to write program that CAN run on those electronics, we need to install the latest Arduino IDE. Take note, I ran into issues installing the latest using "sudo apt-get arduino" so I did some searching and found a workaround. Get the latest IDE installed and we can move on to installing some third party libraries that will make development much easier.

Third Party Libraries (ROS)

ROS is a framework for creating robot software. We will use the concepts provided to design our own framework for communication between all of the sensors. In order to utilize the ROS communication framework on our Arduino, we need to use the RosSerial library. This will expose ROS functionality on the Arduino and make development and integration of all the sensors painless. The first sensor we will be testing is the accelerometer/gyro and luckily, someone already wrote a lean library for reading the raw data.

Goals

Our goals for this week are to get a working, visual, simulation of the accelerometer/gyro in ROS which will mean we need to complete the tutorials. Also, research quaternion math and how it applies to orientation.

Extras!

I got super excited while setting up my environment that I made a little surprise for you! Here is a sneak peak at what all of the above will look like.