Thanks Brian for mentioning our solution and sorry folks for no information about ROS support for SOMANET being available online yet. At ICRA/ROSCon/Automatica we were announcing the release of a lightweight ROS client library for XMOS-based devices like SOMANET, which we call rosxmos. See this diagram for illustration: http://www.synapticon.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/ROS-SOMANET-2.png rosxmos implements the essential ROS communication standards XMLRPC for publishing and subscribing to services/topics and TCP/UDPROS to send and receive message data. Programming a SOMANET User App (for example to do inverse kinematics for a limb, locally process sensor data or realize some hi-fi control loops), you can decide to use rosxmos like a client library to communicate with a ROS master and other nodes. rosxmos-based nodes are built using the SOMANET compiler, not the ROS build system. Thus you can look at it as being proprietary, but we think this is not the right term, as everything of SOMANET you are interested in as an application developer is open-source (drivers, control packages, example apps...). So will be rosxmos, which is also why it will be released in an open ROS Pkg repo as soon as we think of it as being mature to be made available to the community. We can't tell right now when this will be, but we're working hard to be able to release a version around IROS 2012. As soon as it is ready, of course all are welcome to contribute to the development and extend the range of ROS features being available through rosxmos. Until then we'd be happy to answer your questions! Nik -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: ros-users-bounces@code.ros.org [mailto:ros-users-bounces@code.ros.org] Im Auftrag von ros-users-request@code.ros.org Gesendet: Montag, 11. Juni 2012 21:00 An: ros-users@code.ros.org Betreff: ros-users Digest, Vol 28, Issue 10 Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2012 11:47:33 -0700 From: Brian Gerkey To: User discussions Subject: Re: [ros-users] is a native ROS device possible? Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 11:06 AM, John Galloway wrote: > It appears (i.e. just reading the docs, I haven't brought up a ROS env yet) that at present every ROS device has to have an executable (or driver) on a host (which is found in the package for that device). ?It would seem ideal that a device using USB (for example) could have its driver embedded to allow a generic USB driver to detect that this is a ROS device and link it into the graph of nodes (allowing the device to publish and subscribe etc) without a device specific driver being needed. ?Is this possible within the current APIs? Somewhat related are the embedded motor control boards developed by Synapticon (a ROSCon 2012 sponsor): http://www.synapticon.com/ They have some XMOS-based boards that "speak" ROS natively. brian.