Drone Following #10: Added ROS capabilities to sketch

Tonight I added ROS functionality to Arduino sketch. It's just a few lines of code, but they have great implications! The LED state machine is now a Publisher and sends its information via the serial port, so now anything connected to ROS on my laptop can read what state the device is in. Logically, the next step is to start working with the Drone. Here are some screenshots from it in action:

 

As you can see, rosserial got a little upset at my procedure... and I'm not sure why. All 3 states still work in action, but I get lots of mean text as opposed to the approval you get from other message types. A lot of threads seem to indicate this is due to the relative message size and buffer size for the particular board, but I seem to be well within the limits of my ATMEGA32 board. I'm investigating it currently, but as it works, I'll also be moving on to something a lot more exciting.