Hi Ubiquity team,
Whats the plan for migrating ROS version off Kinetic? Kinetic is reaching end of life in April 21 (see here http://wiki.ros.org/Distributions).
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Yes we’re working on getting a Noetic version out.
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cool thanks, how are you going with it? Will there be an upgrade guide?
Well given the scale of the upgrade it’ll definitely have to be an image swap to maintain reliability, so the new images will contain all of our upgraded repos, you’ll just have to move your code from the old images onto the new ones and make sure it compiles under Python 3. There’s probably no practical way around that.
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With regards to this as well, I believe you have mentioned that raspbian 64 is still currently experimental. So does this mean we’d still be running a 32 bit system or would we go ahead with just moving on with 64 experimental raspbian?
Yep, that’s right. And going 32 bit is basically what we’ve been doing although it’ll present some roadblocks for ROS 2 later on, but it’s all we can do for now to get full functionality.
We already have a very very early 32 bit beta image for Noetic but I’m rather reluctant to share it as it’s not been tested at all yet nor has it been made the proper way. Should be all sorted out in the coming weeks though.
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All in good time, excited to try it out!
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Hi Ubiquity,
Any update on the noetic upgrade?
John
Yes we do have a working Noetic beta image you can try out if you want here:
https://ubiquity-pi-image.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/2021-06-22-focal.img.xz
Right now we’re working on apt package support, so it’s still not completely done in terms of plug and play usability, but you should be able to clone the packages you need directly from github and use them that way.
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Thank you @MoffKalast
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johnnyv ROCKS! Hi Dude!
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Hi folks!
Just thought I would mention that I have a working ROS2 / ros2_control port of some of the basic functionality for ubiquity_motor and magni_robot as of yesterday (se previous links for the forks).
Motor control and odometry seem to work ok now at least. I’ll take a look at adding back some of the diagnostics stuff that I temporarily removed over the weekend.
Not so sure what to do about all the dynamic reconfigure functionality that was in the kinetic-devel version of the driver though… Direct interaction with ros topics in the “hardware interface” part of the control-stack seems to be against the design principles of ros2_control. It is not obvious to me how to fit it into the new framework at this time.
I have tested the driver a little in docker on a rpi4 with 64-bit OS using the official arm64v8/ros:galactic as base image and have not seen any issues yet, but it needs more testing of course.
I can set up a Dockerimage with all the dependencies for the galactic branch if someone is interested in testing it out 
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Hi @sam , awesome! My system really depends on fiducual_slam at the moment, so I won’t have a working robot until all of that can be ported across. I’m abit hesitant to try anything too crazy until I can see a good line of sight to all the system components working. But definitely interested in watching your progress.
Also, hi @mjstn2011, the feeling my friend, is mutual 