18r441m/nmea_depth_transducer

ROS driver for NMEA0183 depth transducers.

nmea_depth_transducer

Driver for NMEA0183 depth transducers, which interface with the computer via RS232.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details

Dartmouth Reality and Robotics Lab

Authors: Alberto Quattrini Li - Dartmouth College.

Installation

After configuring the hardware, the following will set the environment to make the ROS driver running. nmea_depth_transducer has been tested under ROS kinetic and Ubuntu 16.04, and ROS melodic and Ubuntu 18.04. This is research code, expect that it changes often and any fitness for a particular purpose is disclaimed.

Dependencies

• Robot Operating System (ROS) (middleware for robotics),

• pynmea2 Library for NMEA 0183 protocol. E.g., in Ubuntu,

    sudo apt install python-nmea2
  

Building

To build from source, clone the latest version from this repository into your catkin workspace and compile the package using

cd catkin_workspace/src
git clone https://github.com/dartmouthrobotics/nmea_depth_transducer.git
cd ../
catkin_make

Usage

You can run the node with (the default values are for the serial)

roslaunch nmea_depth_transducer nmea_depth_transducer.launch

Currently, this package has been tested with a CruzPro ATU120AT interfaced with a serial to USB.

See:

• CruzPro ATU120

Nodes

nmea_depth_transducer_node

Publishes depth and temperature measurements of the depth transducer.

Published Topics

• <sensor_name>/nmea_raw ([nmea_msgs/Sentence])

  NMEA0183 raw message.

• <sensor_name>/depth ([sensor_msgs/Range])

  Depth values in meters.

• <sensor_name>/temperature ([sensor_msgs/Temperature])

  Temperature in Celsius.

Manual testing

With socat a virtual serial port can be created and messages can be sent.

First create the two serial ports:

socat -d -d pty,raw,echo=0,b4800 pty,raw,echo=0,b4800

Run the node:

rosrun nmea_depth_transducer nmea_depth_transducer_node _serial_port:=<port1 path created by socat>

Write a NMEA0183 message to the serial port, e.g., for depth

echo "\$SDDBT,008.8,f,002.7,M,001.4,F*0" > <port2 path created by socat>

or for temperature

echo "\$SDMTW,025.5,C*36" > <port2 path created by socat>