ROS on Steam Deck

Yes,i also strongly recommend the distrobox to run ubuntu in SD

Hello all!

I’m curious to know if anyone here uses the Steam Deck regularly for robot development. Is it a staple in your daily workflow, or did it become a one-time demo that’s now collecting dust?

Not exactly regularly, but we use it for PR events when showing the robots to the public. If there are smaller groups of people, it looks pretty great. For larger groups, the display is too small. And connecting to a 4k TV is a bad idea since the internal display’s resolution is quite small and looks awful mirrored on a 4k display.

We had one problem in rviz - decompressing large images compressed with image_transport/jpg slowed down rviz quite a lot. So I added a republisher that takes the compressed image and decompresses it outside rviz, and everything runs smooth now. We also use point_cloud_transport for transmitting Ouster 3d pointclouds over wifi to the Deck.

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Hi all,

I just got ROS2 Humble installed on steam deck using distrobox (Yay!!), but after entering ubuntu-22-04, I couldn’t get a demo node listener on my PC to hear the demo node talker on the deck or vice versa.

I also cant ping my other PC within distrobox after installing iputils-ping in the podman container on deck.

I made my container with the standard “distrobox create -i ubuntu:22.04” command, but do I need to do anything else to get the container to talk to external devices?