I don't mind here but this forum I thought was for announcements about ROS itself. Not for people who use ROS. Eventually whoever manages this list will jump in and tell us. As for how to obtain a Wild Thumper with encoders there are several options The 'Thumper is made in China by a company called "Dagu Robots" Dagu has a lot of interesting products One is this motor. http://www.dagurobot.com/goods.php?id=87 It is a Wild Thumper motor with encoder. Also if you email Dagu Customer service and ask. They will sell you a wild thumper with this motor replacing the standard motor. They charge not much more than the cost of the motors and BELEIVE ME it is worth it to have then do the work Those are two ways where you have to deal with the Chinese factory. The other way is to notice that the motors Dagu is selling are just normal 25D gear motors. You can buy these from many different vendors. One is Pololu. https://www.pololu.com/search?query=25d+motor&x=0&y=0 You can buy the samemorte and the same encoder from Pololu. But Pololu has something else: They sell motors with no gearboxes. These come with and without encoders. I bought a 25D, 6 volt motor with encoder and not gearbox and swapped two of these into my stock wild thumper. Logically it should have been a screwdriver job and take about 15 minutes But the motors in the wild thumper are press fit into this black plastic holders another is no room for the encoder leads. One last comment. You can NOT simple add encoders to the stock Wild Thumper. Encoders require the motor to have a "back shaft". This back shaft is an extension of the motor shaft out the rear of the motor. Wild thumper meters lack this so you have to replace the motor. When I found you can buy the motor with no gearbox, that is what I got. Doing it all over again, I would simply buy the wild thumper from Dagu directly and save a ton of work. But if yu already own a wild thumper then you have to swap the motor on the center on each side. Back to ROS.... You are going to need a source of odometry. So people are using "virtual odometry" by computing optical flow from video cameras but I think you need real ground truth to calibrate everything else. BTW I just discovered 360 degree cameras. These have a true SPHERICAL field of view. Yes they see EVERYTHING. I want to place one of these on this robot. I am working on software right now to computer optical flow. With a spherical camera, I think(?) vehicle heading is simply the average optical flow times -1. These camera cost under $100. So far i have a helmet mounted camera and I'm walking, collecting test data. --- [Visit Topic](https://discourse.ros.org/t/project-wayfarer/3659/9) or reply to this email to respond. If you do not want to receive messages from ros-users please use the unsubscribe link below. If you use the one above, you will stop all of ros-users from receiving updates. ______________________________________________________________________________ ros-users mailing list ros-users@lists.ros.org http://lists.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users Unsubscribe: