[ros-users] communicating with windows

[Josh Faust]

On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 5:02 AM, Christian Verbeek <
verbeek at servicerobotics.eu> wrote:

>  Just to focus discussion a little bit more. Windows comes into play in
> my eyes only as GUI front-end to a ROS system running on a Linux-PC
> equipped robot. Tools like roslaunch do not make any sense on windows
> where I need to hide everything behind a shine GUI.
>
> Of course it would be very nice to just compile ros libraries directly
> with Visual Studio on windows. But maybe the mingw cross-compiler is the
> best one can do right now. I would even link the whole ROS functionality
> into a shared library build with mingw on Linux giving that shared
> library an interface not using ros at all. That would mean I have to
> translate messages into something usable in my windows application but
> this has to be done anyway.
>
> That leads to the question if it is possible to implement a ROS node
> into a shared library and starting that node without roslaunch and
> environment variables like ROS_MASTER_URI. Does anyone did something
> like that already?


It should be relatively trivial to manually create vcproj's for roscpp and
all its dependencies, but you'll need to do the message generation manually.
 I'm not sure how useful that would be though, since you may want a lot of
the low-level support libraries and messages as well (such as the common and
geometry stacks).  If all you want is roscpp though it should be doable.

As far as environment variables, I believe everything you'd need is also
available as a command-line option and can be specified through one of the
ros::init() versions.  Specifically: __master and possibly __ip or
__hostname.

Josh
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