Usage with ROS and Python 2.7

[RicardoM17]

Hello @alexglzg

I saw a member of your organization raising an issue about interfacing the Digi Python library with ROS and as such Python 2.7. (namely @vSebas here )

Is this something that you managed to figure out and get working? Or any progress that you've made that you can share?

I would be greatly appreciated if any of you could get back to me, hopefully with some help.

Thanks in advance!!

[alexglzg]

Hi @RicardoM17

Yes, we managed to get something working on Python 2 with ROS. In this repository (which we know is not yet well-documented) you can find our progress on communicating two Digi XTend modules using ROS Kinetic. It is working well so far.

You should see the repository below, where the "migrated" library from Python 3 to Python 2 is located. I managed to make it work with the Digi XTend and made the same changes for the other Digi modules functions. It has not crashed yet on our XTend's, but I did not do any further debugging after I got it working, so there could be something wrong on functions that we are not calling in our application.
https://github.com/alexglzg/xbee-python/tree/xtend-python-2

Hope it helps!

[RicardoM17]

Hi @alexglzg it's good to hear back from you (there's little documentation about this and is confusing) and apparently with good news

So if I understand correctly it is indeed possible to have XBee working with Python and with ROS.

Have you tried this with the standard library or any other library? and again just to confirm the only way you have it working right now is by using this migrated library?

Lastly is there a place I could reach out to you were I could ping you with some quick questions if the need arises? Github issues is, a bit slow haha. Though I don't want to take too much of your time it would be certainly very useful for me.

Or if you have any links/documentation that you followed or created it would help immensely I'm sure.

Thank you a lot once again!

[alexglzg]

Hi @RicardoM17

Yes, so far the only way we have our system working is with the migrated library, which is the Python 3 xbee-python library with modifications on syntaxis and other differences between Python 3 and Python 2. It does not work with the main xbee-python and although we wanted to try alternatives like XbeeMav, we did not.

You can reach me at my mail, alexglzg97@gmail.com, if you need to.

You are welcome!