[ros-users] driver implementation

[Blaise Gassend]

Hi Marti,

If you feel that your drivers would benefit from using the driver_base
package, feel free to use them. Should you chose to use driver_base, the
problems you are likely to encounter are:

- There is currently nearly no documentation.
- It is likely to change in the future, as it has not been reviewed, and
there are many things in the API that I do not currently like.

The advantages for you of using driver_base is that it makes it easier
to support dynamic configuration, self tests and diagnostics. When I get
a chance to add things like disabling the driver driver_base, you will
automatically benefit from the enhancements.

In general I try to make API changes as painless as possible, trying not
to break old code without a deprecation period. That makes it easier to
support my drivers that use driver_base. But I can't guarantee that this
will be the case. Also, if you are using boxturtle, you can be sure that
the API for driver_base will not change. It will only change when you
switch to the next distribution.

I hope this helps answer your question,
Blaise

On Wed, 2010-03-10 at 12:40 +0100, Marti Morta wrote:
> Hi,
> I am a new ROS user and in the group where I am involved, we are 
> considering to use ROS as a communication middleware for a mobile 
> platform. We have already read the documentation and done the main 
> tutorials.
> 
> We would like to develop the drivers for the platform and also for the 
> different sensors on board. We have checked the hokuyo_node driver 
> source code and we've seen that it depends on the classes driver and 
> driver_node. We were thinking on developing our drivers following the 
> same architecture, by inheriting from these two classes.
> 
> However, we have seen in the driver_common wiki documentation that these 
> classes are immature and for internal use. We were wondering which is 
> the best way to implement our drivers. We would like to avoid data 
> publishing without using the driver hierarchy as we have seen in other 
> driver implementations.
> 
> regards,
> 
> Martí
> 
>  
> ____________________________________________________________
> Martí Morta Garriga 			  mmorta at iri.upc.edu
> Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial       CSIC-UPC
> Llorens i Artigas 4-6, 2a pl.         08028 Barcelona, Spain
> 
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