ReachView 2.11+ and ROS Topics

Hello everyone,

I’m running into an issue that shows up when using ROS, but I believe the issue stems from the ReachView application, or something related, possibly. This is moreso a sanity check to see if anyone has experienced this same problem.

Setup:

  • Emlid Reach RS GPS unit
  • ReachView version 2.14
  • ROS Kinetic on a laptop running Ubuntu 16.04
  • ROS package: nmea_navsat_driver

Method:

  1. I have the GPS unit outside in the open sky, and connected my local wireless network. (Everything on the GPS side of things is working in that regard. No problems getting a fix or connecting to an NTRIP station.)
  2. On my Linux machine, I use ROS to read in the NMEA strings on a ROS topic. I understand not everyone here uses ROS, so I’m not sure how much detail to go into here.

The problem:
In the past, with ReachView version 2.10 or lower, I’m able to subscribe and echo the GPS /fix topic with no problems. When I upgrade to ReachView 2.11 and up, I’m not able to subscribe or echo the GPS /fix data. It shows up, and NMEA sentences are printing, but other ROS nodes are unable to actually tap into the data itself.

Whenever I downgrade ReachView, changing nothing else, everything works again.

I’m just wondering if anyone else has ever seen this before??

I just tried upgrading to 2.14 this morning after staying at 2.10 forever, and it’s still doing this same problem.

By the way, is there still the v2.9 zip file? In the meantime I’d like to downgrade again so I get back to a working system.

Regardless, these GPS units have been awesome and a lot of fun to work with. If this just isn’t me being an idiot, though, this could be a bit of an issue for people wanting to integrate the Emlid units with ROS.

thanks!

Nick

1 Like

I’ll post on here as I figure some things out.

After looking a little further, I’m starting to zoom in on the issue and it seems related to ReachView and the nmea_navsat_driver not playing well.

I can echo other ROS topics, it’s specifically the /fix topic that the nmea_navsat_driver ROS package is publishing GPS sentences to that’s not working when ReachView is 2.11 or higher.

Hi @popenc,

Unfortunately, we don’t officially support ROS for Reach. So, I can’t provide you with the exact answer.
Hope that users with the same workflow can help you cope with this.

Thanks.

@andrew.yushkevich, thanks for the reply.

For the time being I’ve decided to keep the version up to date, and I’m now grabbing the GPS data from the Emlid’s socket.io server using the socketIO-client Python library. This workaround is nice because then I don’t have to worry about the additional ROS package (nmea_navsat_driver) and we can free up a USB port on our robot.

If I figure out anything, though, I’ll comment on here. It might be a while as the above workaround is sufficient for us.

Thanks!

Thanks for sharing, @popenc!
Hope to see your project results soon.

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