ROS Tips (using it and developing for it)

General Tips

Be sure that in all ros files (js or python or otherwise), custom messages or services or whatever else are referenced by the package they come from. For example, instead of /rover_command you should put mcu_control/rover_command.

See here for the ROS wiki's list of IDEs that you could use for ROS development. It's not necessary to use these but there are some ROS plugins that can make things a bit nicer for dev work.

Bash Tips

You can find some tips in this readme but I should be moving those sections of the readme to this file in the future.

Python Tips

At the time of writing this, I have a collection of demo scripts hiding in the mcu_control package. This includes a subscriber, a publisher, a service, and some combinations thereof. It's useful because it's not always obvious how to implement multiple ROS features within the same Python script.

For client/service python scripts, be sure to import * because the callback function is held inside and has a wordy name that you might forget to import.

Design Best Practices

• ROS wiki best practices
• Another best practices guide with more detail
• Deciding between using topics, services, and actions
• When to split up a package and when to turn nodes into packages
• Another thing
• ROS Developer's Guide