Looking for a group to help implement ROS Serial with the Propeller chip

[RoboTy]

Hello,

I've been interested in ROS for a while now (http://www.ros.org/wiki/). Somewhat recently some individuals wrote a stack for directly communicating with low cost microcontrollers from within ROS. The only specific microcontroller to be implemented as of yet is the Arduino (ATmega328).

Is anyone interested in helping out? You can run ROS on many SBC or embedded PC including gumstix, beagleboard, FitPC, Android Phones, RoBoard. ROS is being led by willow garage (http://www.willowgarage.com/) but has a huge community of researchers and more than 100 repositories.

Is anyone out there interested in helping me with a propeller client library (or does one already exist?). I know very little about programming so any help would be greatly appreciated.
http://www.ros.org/wiki/rosserial

I think the propeller would be an very useful i/o device for a PC running ROS (much more so than the Arduino).

It sounds like a C++ compiler for the propeller would make things pretty easy, but I don't think that exists.

Please respond here or send me a message if you'd like to help.

Thanks,
Tyler

[Kye]

Wait until prop GCC is out. Alpha testing may start soon. Parallax is currently working on providing C and C++ support for the prop chip. Until then however you will be wasting effort.

Thanks,

[JamesRonald]

Tyler,

Yes, I have interest in working with you on such. In the past I have found it quite easy to port C code to SPIN. However, I'm not sure if I would use ROS serial as a starting point though. I didn't remember seeing support for velocity commands or odometry which would be desired for controlling the motorised base. I was thinking about using the open source firmware from the Arbotix controller (http://www.vanadiumlabs.com/arbotix.html) as a starting point, but I still need to do some investigation.

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Best regards
James Ronald