Different versions of ROS running on robot vs laptop?

asked 2015-12-21 15:32:06 -0500

tommytwoeyes

57 ●14 ●17 ●20

Hi everyone,

I'm a ROS n00b and am trying to get up and running with my first ROS robot. Here's my setup:

Wild Thumper chassis
Raspberry Pi 2
UbuntuARM
Sparkfun Monster Moto Shield
Arduino Mega2560 for actuactor/sensor interfacing with RPi 2

My laptop is a Macbook Pro, so I downloaded a VirtualBox machine with ROS already installed. It has ROS Indigo.

A couple of questions:

Does it matter if the ROS versions on the Raspberry Pi 2 and on the VM (which will be ROS Master) differ?
If it's not critical that the versions match, is it recommended/ideal/better in some way if they do match?
I see that Indigo is the stable version of ROS right now, while Jade is the latest. Is Indigo better for a complete beginner, since it is the stable branch? Or are there some significant benefits to running Jade?

Any advice for the best configuration with versions, etc, for a complete ROS n00b would be greatly appreciated! Also, if anyone has any suggestions regarding things I've overlooked, or might not know to ask about, that would be really greatly appreciated! :) Thanks

answered 2015-12-21 15:56:40 -0500

nickw

flag of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

1504 ●5 ●32 ●31 http://twitter.com/tinkernick

By definition there will have been changes between one version and the other. This could cause issues which are difficult to resolve with a simple update of software to ensure they use the same version, as one version will always be different to the other. You are creating a situation that could cause issues that you don't need to. Getting a robot to work correctly is hard enough already.

I would suggest Indigo as the most stable and tested of the two.

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I see. So, to be clear, you are saying that a robot with ROS Jade installed cannot communicate with or work effectively with a ROS Master (laptop) which has ROS Indigo installed?

tommytwoeyes ( 2015-12-21 16:03:09 -0500 )edit

no - it won't be that extreme - it could work fine, but if it doesn't it might be something that you've done wrong, or an incompatibility because of changes between versions. you probably don't need that uncertainty

nickw ( 2015-12-21 16:22:33 -0500 )edit

Ok, I see. It seemed unlikely that different versions of ROS would not be inter-operable. But, as you said, when you're a beginner building a new robot, it's hard enough as it is, so you don't want to create unnecessary issues. I've uninstalled ROS Jade on my Pi 2 & replaced it with Indigo. Thanks!

tommytwoeyes ( 2015-12-21 16:41:27 -0500 )edit

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