Kyle Fazzari

Some time ago I created a blog/video series that walked the reader through creating a prototype using the Robot Operating System (ROS) and taking it to production using Ubuntu Core. However, that series was intended more for robotics professionals; it assumed quite a bit of ROS knowledge, and required some costly equipment (the robot was

This article originally appeared on Kyle’s blog You’ve heard it a million times: snaps bundle their dependencies. People seem to understand and accept the technical aspects of this, but today I want to talk about a more philosophical aspect. If you’re used to more traditional packaging, then you’re used to each project being standalone, e

This article originally appeared on Kyle’s blog When it comes to developing snaps, there’s a particular confusion out there that I see over and over again: build-time versus run-time. For example: “I’m building a snap, but I can’t seem to convince Snapcraft to place my config file in $SNAP_DATA.” In this post, I want to show

So you’re considering (or are in the process of) bringing a robot, using open source software, to market. It’s based on Linux. Maybe you’re using the Robot Operating System (ROS), or the Mission Oriented Operating Suite (MOOS), or yet another open-source middleware that’s helping you streamline development. As development nears something

This is a follow-up to the ROS prototype to production on Ubuntu Core series to answer a question I received: “What if I want to make an image for the factory, but don’t want to make my snaps public?” This question is of course not robotics-specific, and neither is its answer. In this post we’ll

If you’re familiar with ROS (Robot Operating System), chances are you’re also familiar with the Turtlebot. The first version of the Turtlebot was created back in 2010 to serve as an inexpensive platform for learning ROS. This was followed in 2012 by the Turtlebot 2, which has since become the reference platform for learning ROS.

This is the fifth (and final) blog post in this series about ROS production. In the previous post we created a gadget snap to allow confined access to the Turtlebot. In this post, we’re going to put all the pieces from this series together and create an Ubuntu Core image with our ROS snap preinstalled,

This is the fourth blog post in this series about ROS production. In the previous post we created a snap of our prototype, and released it into the store. In this post, we’re going to work toward an Ubuntu Core image by creating what’s called a gadget snap. A gadget snap contains information such as

This is the third blog post in this series about ROS production. In the previous post we came up with a simple ROS prototype. In this post we’ll package that prototype as a snap. For justifications behind why we’re doing this, please see the first post in the series. We know from the previous post

This is the second blog post in this series about ROS production. In the previous post we discussed why Ubuntu Core was a good fit for production robotics. In this post we’ll be on classic Ubuntu, creating the example ROS prototype that we’ll use throughout the rest of the series as we work toward using

Please note that this blog post has outdated technical information that may no longer be correct. For latest updated documentation about robotics in Canonical please visit https://ubuntu.com/robotics/docs. My background is pretty heavily littered with robotics. A natural side effect of this is that I’ve published numerous posts discussing

One of the key tenets of snaps is that they bundle their dependencies. The fact that they’re self-contained helps their transactional-ness: upgrading or rolling back is essentially just a matter of unmounting one snap and mounting the other. However, historically this was also one of their key downsides: every snap must be standalone. For

Previous Robot Operating System (ROS) releases only supported i386, amd64, and armhf. I even tried building ROS Indigo from source for arm64 about a year ago, but ran into dependency issues with a missing sbcl. Well, with surprisingly little fanfare, ROS Kinetic was released with support for arm64 in their prebuilt archive! I thought it