As a disclaimer, I'm not a serious software/electronics engineer, but
wouldn't it be conceivable to have a ROS USB device that shows up as an
ethernet NIC that automagically connects to the ROS master? I don't know
how different OSes handle USB NICs, but it might work with little or no
configuration (you could tell it the URI of the master, if it isn't
localhost:11311).

--Max

On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 5:48 PM, John Galloway <jrg@toasterfish.com> wrote:

>
> On Jun 8, 2012, at 12:00 PM, Morgan Quigley wrote:
>
> I heartily agree the long-term vision of allowing embedded systems to
> plug-and-play into a live ROS system, where "plugging in" the embedded
> device would be analogous to launching a "typical" ROS node's POSIX
> process. This will require a great deal of work to make possible, but
> it's on my long-term wish list as well.
>
> -Morgan
>
>
> On Jun 8, 2012, at 12:00 PM, Jonathan Bohnen wrote:
> You can check out his [Morgan's] thoughts on the subject here:
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wnab6AjAwc&feature=player_detailpage#t=1648s
>
> Have you looked at rosserial? http://ros.org/wiki/rosserial While I
> haven't used it, it seems like it gets part of the way there by having
> embedded devices that talk in ROS messages, and they just connect to a
> generic rosserial driver on a host machine:
> http://ros.org/wiki/rosserial_python
> best,
>
> -j
>
> Thanks guys.  Good video (cool hand!) and rosserial does seem to be along
> the lines I had in mind.  As for what I'm trying to do, really sort of just
> thinking about what I might like to try and do actually.  Last time I took
> a break from employment and was playing with robotics I thought what was
> really needed to get more folks working at the application level was to
> make it much much easier to build a robot, which I found rather challenging
> (more like buying a cpu, motherboard, DIMMs, disks, powersupply and case
> and building a PC, no soldering required).  So you'd need
> electro-mechanical subsystems that could plug and play, which ROS (and its
> brethren) I think are making much more possible now than 6 yeas ago.  So
> now that I'm between jobs and again thinking about what I want to do when I
> grow up, I'm just catching up to see where things are, whats going on etc
> in that general direction (looks good!).
>
> thanks again!
>  -jrg
>
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