Jash Mota

RIDE: a ROS package and boilerplate code generator

Since my university days, I’ve been heavily using ROS for my robots. And that means I need to make quite some packages while developing the robot’s software.


I’ve only used ROS1, and at least in ROS1, generating packages with node files is a laborious and repetitive process.


The nodes, which act as publishers or subscribers, or both will have a general class structure, include files, callback structure, which is going to be the same across these nodes. So one should not be required to rewrite the whole thing.


So I wrote a python script that would read a YAML file, which mentions package name, dependencies, nodes and its publishers and subscribers, and in turn its topics.
I thought a lot of people could benefit from such a program so I put it up on GitHub with the name RIDE. People have found it useful and that’s fantastic.
I initially wanted it to take package description via a node graph which a user can make using the rqt_graph like application. But since I’ve never worked with qt or GUI apps in general, I dropped the plan. For now, the YAML files do just well.
I’d like to add functionality for services, actions, etc. as well since developers would also be frequently using those concepts


You can view the demo video for RIDE here:
 
Or head over to the GitHub repo. Do leave a star if you like it. This helps other people discover this tool.