The UDP chatter package

Overview

This package provides a UDP based chat server-client on Linux. It uses the boost library to setup sockets to publish / receive messages across ports. This has been tested on Ubuntu 18.04.

Features

Following features are available -

• Uses modern C++ (14)
• Separate IP addresses for sending and receiving messages
• Separate ports for listening and sending messages
• Command line tool for publishing messages to specified IP and port
  • Ability to set IP and port to publish to
  • Ability to publish a single message or continuously at specified rate

Future work

• Command line tool for receiving messages
• GUI for chatting
• Documentation
• Extend to using as ROS pkg

Installation / Compilation

This package is built on cmake, and has a CmakeLists.txt to build the executable. In order to compile and build the executable, run the following commands -

mkdir build; cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install  # Optional if you want to install to your lib path

Usage

This section walks through using the tools available in this package.

udp_sender

Use the command line tool, udp_sender to send udp messages. If no arguments are specified, a help message is displayed -

./udp_sender -h
Command line tool for sending udp messages, usage: ./udp_sender [args...] -- msg:
  -h [ --help ]                     Display this help message and exit
  -v [ --version ]                  Display the version number
  -r [ --rate ] arg                 Data publish rate in hz
  -i [ --ip_addr ] arg (=127.0.0.1) IP address to publish messages to
  -p [ --port ] arg (=10001)        Port to publish messages to
  -1 [ --once ] [=arg(=stdin)]      Publish one message and exit
  --msg arg                         Message to be published

To publish a message once, to the default ip and port (127.0.0.1:10001), run -

./udp_sender -1 -- hello world

To publish a message at a specified rate (in hz), to the default ip and port (127.0.0.1:10001), run -

./udp_sender -r 1 -- hello world

To publish a message to a different ip and port, run -

./udp_sender 1 -p 10002 -i 192.168.3.12  -- Hello world

The udp_chatter executable is a server / client used as a template.

License

Copyright (c) 2021-2022 srsidd. Not to be distributed or used without prior approval.