macOS with ARM

Should we try and get a development kit to see if ROS2 will work on ARM based Macs?

I’m sure that would be interesting to see, but I don’t think we (Open Robotics) or I have the resources to do that right now. If you do it on your own and find issues we can try to help resolve them though.

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I’ll see if I can get one to work with it. It might make it easier to get ROS working on an iPad or other hardware.

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That would be beyond exciting — Imagine being able to use the iPad Pro LIDAR, or even FaceID in a ROS application!

Is there a decent amount of interest in ROS on iOS? @esteve has worked on an Objective C client library and Fast RTPS should be working on iOS. Was planning to make it a personal project this summer to develop a Swift client, if anyone would find that useful.

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I actually forked that project to make it work on Foxy since I believe it only works on Crystal. I’m down to help you migrate it to swift since I was thinking of doing the same thing.

@zmk5 Cool! Would appreciate some help. Wrapping the c rcl library should be pretty trivial. Currently trying to work on message generation, CMake isn’t quite my forte though, so that’s a bit of a challenge for me. The other thing I’m trying to figure out is building. Trying to decide whether it would be best to use the newly created CMake for Swift or go the Swift package manager route?

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Interesting. I’m kind of curious how you are wrapping the binaries.

The message generation is what I’m having difficulty with too. The way to do it changed between versions so the old code isn’t working. I’m still trying to figure out how to move the msg files to idl like the guides suggest.

I would check out rcldotnet. Esteve made that at the same time as the objective c, but I see a few contributors have updated it for Foxy. I’ve found it somewhat a better reference than the objective C for that reason

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Thank you! I didn’t know about this project. This will definitely help me out in getting the messages. I already ported over the Publisher and Subscriber into Objective-C, so I’ll see if I can do the messages.

Here is my branch btw if you want to look at it.

FYI I’ve spent the last month working on my swift implementation, derived from dotnet client. Almost done with message generation. It builds super easily on Linux with colcon and ament Cmake, so that’s nice. The whole core client library still needs writing once message generation is complete, let me know if you’re interested in contributing or would prefer to stick with the objective C library. The idea with my ground up rewrite is to support more features like executors and multi node composition, enabled by the excellent GCD framework.

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I’d be more than happy to help out what I can! Where is your repo located?

Running into CMake issues with the generator… working on debugging that. All the code is setup for message gen, but cmake isn’t cooperating.

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