writing a publisher and subscriber and unsure how to finish it

edit

I have created a package (my_pkg) with two nodes, trying to reproduce your situation.. It is like that:

catkin_create_pkg my_pkg rospy std_msgs message_generation message_runtime

CMakeLists.txt

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8.3)
project(my_pkg)

find_package(catkin REQUIRED COMPONENTS
  message_generation
  message_runtime
  rospy
  std_msgs
)

add_message_files(
  FILES
  two_ints.msg
)

generate_messages(
  DEPENDENCIES
  std_msgs
)

catkin_package(
#  INCLUDE_DIRS include
#  LIBRARIES my_pkg
#  CATKIN_DEPENDS message_generation message_runtime rospy std_msgs
#  DEPENDS system_lib
)

include_directories(
  ${catkin_INCLUDE_DIRS}
)

package.xml

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<package>
  <name>my_pkg</name>
  <version>0.0.0</version>
  <description>The my_pkg package</description>

  <maintainer email="user@todo.todo">user</maintainer>

  <license>TODO</license>

  <buildtool_depend>catkin</buildtool_depend>
  <build_depend>message_generation</build_depend>
  <build_depend>rospy</build_depend>
  <build_depend>std_msgs</build_depend>
  <run_depend>message_runtime</run_depend>
  <run_depend>rospy</run_depend>
  <run_depend>std_msgs</run_depend>

  <export>

  </export>
</package>

The message file msg/two_ints.msg

int16 a
int16 b

The publisher node (that publishes the two_ints message) scripts/publisher_two_ints.py:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import rospy

from my_pkg.msg import two_ints

def main():
    rospy.init_node("two_ints_publisher")
    pub = rospy.Publisher("two_ints", two_ints, queue_size=1)
    r = rospy.Rate(1)

    msg = two_ints()
    while not rospy.is_shutdown():
        msg.a = 2
        msg.b = 15
        pub.publish(msg)
        r.sleep()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    try:
        main()
    except rospy.ROSInterruptException:
        pass

And finally, the one you are interested, the subscriber, which calculates the sum and publishes the result into the /sum topic: (subscriber_two_ints.py)

#!/usr/bin/env python
import rospy

from my_pkg.msg import two_ints
from std_msgs.msg import Int16

result = Int16()

def callback(msg):
    result.data = msg.a + msg.b
    rospy.loginfo(result)

def main():
    rospy.init_node("two_ints_subscriber")
    pub = rospy.Publisher("sum", Int16, queue_size=1)
    sub = rospy.Subscriber("two_ints", two_ints, callback)
    r = rospy.Rate(1)

    while not rospy.is_shutdown():
        pub.publish(result)
        r.sleep()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    try:
        main()
    except rospy.ROSInterruptException:
        pass

Basically, you have a publisher and a publisher+subscriber. It's common to have a node with both, you have to handle the loop rate and the callback methods and be careful to not freeze inside your loop.

You can check the development, step-by-step in this video: https://youtu.be/H6bw5aw9mOQ

I hope it can help you!