I do think the mechanical and electrical aspects of robotics (ie the mechatronics) are ignored or glazed over when teaching robotics, especially through simulation. One has a new appreciation for how wheels roll on carpet once they try to implement a control / path planning algorithm on a real robot in their living room! It would be valuable to gain these "appreciations" by learning robotics more intimately with real robots.

Agree, hands on is great and it's an awesome way to learn. Anything that gets hardware in to more hands is positive. However, limited programming of a third-party hardware platform is a far cry from learning "mobile robotics" in any intellectually honest sense, which was my original point. Useful indeed, but a small part of the overall equation.

The grandparent obviously has limited experience. Custom electromechanical systems, particularly mobile ones, are not like software. You can't spitball them together in five minutes for free, and you can't build more than a tiny percentage of things using ready-made parts if you care about weight/space/cost/repeatability/efficiency/etc. Particularly if you are planning to take them to market and want a defensible USP.

@ncmncm Thx for the comment. Yes ROS 2 is the robot operating system v2 - www.ros.org - which is historically a challenge to interface with uC's, hence the post share. I'm trying to build a cheap platform for people to learn ROS (2) and robotics hence the interest in using cheap (yet capable) uC's like the ESP32.

The example actually does use HW timers to blink the LED from a ROS message.

Let me know if you have other suggestions.

Thank you, I did not pick up that the example used HW timers. That alone makes it much better than typical tutorials.

This is really a very helpful document, and not just for setting up an ROS controller.

+1. Please don't hesitate to reach out - jack AT hadabot DOT com - with other questions.

The short elevator pitch in my "unofficial" over-simplified own words - "ROS is framework to program complex robotics applications that encourages modularity and shareability of modules. ROS is to robotics development what Django/Rails is to web development."

ROS2 is version 2 of the original ROS framework.

As a results of the ROS framework, a number of modules (packages in ROS-talk) for complex robotics algorithms, functionality has been implemented by companies / the community and shared among each other.

For instance, Hadabot reuses the Navigation package (along with many others) that has been pre-impremented which allows me to employ many robotics functionalities without having to re-invent the wheel.

This is exactly what I'm trying to address with Hadabot. A systematic / opinionated way to learn ROS (specifically ROS 2), understand its significance, in a hands-on manner, with a real robot. The next milestone for Hadabot is a very simple introductory ROS robotics curriculum / syllabus that is not as intimidating as a MOOC, requires low mental load to get started and reach various milestones. Lots of hard work ahead to get this right! Don't hesitate to reach out w thoughts and opinions - jack AT hadabot DOT com - Jack