Joaquim Ignatious Monteiro

2 minute read

Configure VS Code for rosserial_arduino

The package rosserial_arduino contains Arduino-specific extensions required to run rosserial_client on an Arduino boards. Roswiki has detailed tutorials and examples to configure the Arduino IDE to use rosserial_arduino. Here we disuss the steps to configure VS Code for rosserial_arduino project.

Install rosserial_arduino (if not already installed)

sudo apt-get install ros-noetic-rosserial-arduino sudo apt-get install ros-noetic-rosserial

  1. Install platformio extension from VS code extensions

In case of the Platformio installation error PlatformIO IDE can’t find Python interpreter on Linux install python3-venv sudo apt install python3-venv

  1. Once the platformio extension is installed, create a new project in platformio vscode
    • give a project name
    • select the board // search for uno
    • select a project location
  2. Platformio automatically detects the USB port to which Arduino board is connect to the PC. In case, it does not, follow these steps
    a) Run the command ls /dev/tty* in a terminal
    b) USB port would be listed as /dev/ttyUSB*
    c) Edit the platformio.ini file within the project folder
    • Add the line monitor_port = /dev/ttyUSB0
          if the step b lists the port as /dev/ttyUSB0
  3. Build ros_lib library in the project folder
    • Right click on the lib folder in the project folder within the VS code explorer pane.
    • Select the option “Open in Integrated Terminal”. _This will open the directory in a terminal within VS code
    • In the terminal window you just opened, run the following command:

rosrun rosserial_arduino make_libraries.py .
    Note the “.” at the end; this would create ros_lib library in the lib folder. \

This will build the ros_lib library in your project. Once this is finished we can move on to using our test script for out microcontroller.

  1. Write the script to be downloaded to Arduino in the project name/src/main.cpp

  2. Build the project and upload it to the Arduino board

Video tutorial

Other Errors

  • In case of the following error avrdude stk500_recv() programmer is not responding comes up while uploading the code to the Arduino board, follow the solutions in the links given below.

99-platformio-udev.rules
platformio-arduino-error message

  • avrdude stk500_recv() programmer is not responding may also arise if ROS Serial is running while code is being dumped to Arduino board.
    The solution is simple : Stop the rosserial_arduino running in the terminal and then again try to dump code to Arduino.