Liquid Galaxy

This repo contains ROS software for running Liquid Galaxy applications.

It allows for displaying engaging content in an immersive environment. Currently it supports:

• Google Earth with KML support
• Streetview
• mplayer
• Chrome and...
• every asset that is supported by above apps

General requirements

NOTE: all requirements specific to ros_nodes are in their respective README.md files

• Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
• ros-melodic
• awesome window manager on the top of Xorg for automatic window positioning
• only Nvidia hardware was tested but it should be running with whatever decent accelerated graphics card
• possibility to modify udev configuration
• spacenavigator
• industry standard touchscreen like elo touch 2201L is also a good input device
• it's also good to manage your stack with chef

Running LG

• Pull docker image docker pull endpoint/lg_ros_nodes

• On linux docker run -i -t lg_ros_nodes /bin/bash

• On OSX

  • in Xquartz settings go to Security and check Authenticate connections checkbox
  • get your IP and set $ip var ip=$(ifconfig en0 | grep inet | awk '$1=="inet" {print $2}')
  • allow connections to your Xquartz X server xhost + $ip
  • run it! docker run -i -t lg_ros_nodes /bin/bash

Making it running old-fashioned way

First, clone the repos (you can replace ~/src if you want).

$ cd ~/src
$ git clone git://github.com/EndPointCorp/lg_ros_nodes.git
$ git clone git://github.com/EndPointCorp/appctl.git

Then run the init script.

$ cd ~/src/lg_ros_nodes/
$ ./scripts/init_workspace

Then re-run the init script with arguments to direct the script to those new repos

$ cd ~/src/lg_ros_nodes
$ ./scripts/init_workspace --appctl ~/src/appctl/appctl

Install system dependencies with rosdep.

$ cd ~/src/lg_ros_nodes/catkin
$ rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro melodic -y

Build the project.

$ cd ~/src/lg_ros_nodes/catkin
$ catkin_make

Run Google Earth, Streetview and Panoviewer sample .launch file:

roslaunch --screen lg_common/launch/dev.launch

NOTE: As new ros nodes are added to this git repo, re-run ./scripts/init_workspace and the rosdep install command.

Development

If you have Liquid Galaxy hardware (headnode + displaynodes), you may want to do the development on it. There's a sync script that will automatically build and transfer your artifact to display nodes and run it afterwards.

To use it:

• make sure that your local catkin/src/ has all nodes that are configured to run on your dispnodes (in their respective roslaunch xml files) - if there are any nodes lacking, they will be ran from /opt/ros directory instead of /home/lg/catkin_ws/ directory where your development build is going to be copied to

• run sync script (do it everytime you want to test sth):

./scripts/sync_to_disp_nodes.sh

This script will build ROS nodes from your locally checked out branch, transfer it to dispnodes and run it by restarting roslaunch service, thanks to the fact that roslaunch service on dispnodes is configured in such way that it attempts to run any development artifact (in /home/lg/catkin_ws) that it finds before launching production ROS nodes that are located under /opt/ros.

Making new release

• newly created ROS nodes need to be listed in the pack-debs script for CI server to build them and distribute to the aptly repository, after CI build is finished, check that the debs exist in aptly under an URL corresponding to the release tag

• release from the master branch

• to make new release you need to:

touch catkin/CATKIN_IGNORE
touch docker_nodes/CATKIN_IGNORE

• make sure your tags are pulled - otherwise you'll generate a duplicate

git remote update

• generate changelog:

  catkin_generate_changelog

• edit all your .rst changelogs - remove unwanted or bogus messages and make them look pretty. Use catkin_generate_changelog --all to create CHANGELOG.rst for a new package.

• commit it to prepare for creating new release artifact:

  git commit -am "updated changelogs for new release"

• once that's done, prepare release and send it to the build farm:

catkin_prepare_release

NOTE, catkin_prepare_relase ight be a bit broken, so patch /opt/ros/melodic/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/catkin/package_version.py with the below

@@ -127,8 +127,8 @@ def update_changelog_sections(changelogs, new_version):
         new_changelog_data[changelog_path] = data

     for changelog_path, data in new_changelog_data.items():
-        with open(changelog_path, 'w') as f:
-            f.write(data)
+        with open(changelog_path, 'wb') as f:
+            f.write(data.encode('utf-8'))

 def rename_section(data, old_label, new_label):

• remove the CATKIN_IGNORE file, otherwise e.g. catkin_make will ignore packges to compile ...

Global parameters

• /logging/level: sets the minimum log level. Valid values are from 0 to 3: INFO = 0, WARNING = 1, LOG_ERROR = 2, LOG_FATAL = 3. This is not rospy log level but an argument passed to applications managed by appctl