[ros-users] Questions about PR2 web interface

[Jeremy Leibs]

Sorry for the delay in addressing this issue.

2010/7/12 Nayden Chivarov <nshivarov at code.bg>:
>
>
> What files should be placed  in /etc/ros/env? - Please could You give us
> some Example setup?

This is actually a very confusing issue at the moment which nobody
really understands completely and nobody has ownership of.

We're actually in the process of figuring out how to phase out
/etc/ros/env all together since it only seems to lead to confusion and
inconsistency.

>
> We have tried to setup pr2 sim together with webui stack (apache, python,
> etc requirements installed). However we are not able to launch it by opening
> http://IP_OF_THE_PR2, if You could give us any ideas how to configure it
> would be welcome, since after installing webui stack we haven’t  connected
> with PR2, just we have seen a login screen.
>

Sorry that you have not had success with this yet.

As a step toward simplifying usage of the web interface, I have
recently made some large changes to the web_interface stack in trunk.
In particular, I have added a package, "ros_apache2" which contains
everything necessary to launch a secondary apache server in userspace.
 This server comes up on port 8080 instead, instead of the default 80.
 It inherits its ros environment from your local environment and as
such does not need /etc/roc/env to be configured.

This is now launched as part of webui.launch.

If you check out trunk of the web_interface stack, you might have more
success getting that running.

https://code.ros.org/svn/wg-ros-pkg/stacks/web_interface/trunk

With trunk of web_interface overlayed on cturtle, I was able to bring
up gazebo with a pr2, roslaunch webui webui.launch and then go to
http://localhost:8080, and successfully interface to the pr2 with the
webui.

The only environment variable it still makes use of at the moment is:
"/etc/ros/env/ROBOT", to determine which apps to display.  I intend to
switch this over to using a parameter from the parameter server,
however, possibly by the end of the day.

NOTE: trunk is not stable and I may be breaking things as I proceed.
However, it may still be easier to work with than the existing
mechanism of dealing with /etc/ros/env.  It may also provide guidance
in getting an appropriate apache server running through a different
mechanism.

I will send out a more detailed email when I finish making all of my
changes to the stack and releasing a new version of web_interface.

--Jeremy