johnny-five VS ROS

Some times ago I have played with johnny-five, a JavaScript Robotics & IoT platform. In short words, we can communicate with our Arduino or Raspberry by using JavaScript with a very friendly syntax.

The library Johnny-Five is a Javascript library that allows you to control Arduino and other microcontrollers using Javascript. It is very easy to use and it has a lot of examples that you can use to learn how to use it.

+Here is the platform used to program the board http://johnny-five.io/

I decided to use the Johnny-Five JavaScript framework for this. After installing it , I started by declaring a few variables and instantiating the transmitter board.

IOT is the internet of things. That loosely means - interconnected devices that aren't your standard "computer." You can totally do that with JS and a little computer like an Arduino. You can use https://johnny-five.io/ or something... but I'm talking about - a year from now -

here it the project's github: https://github.com/rwaldron/johnny-five

Johnny Five seems like a neat project for that bit. What I'm trying to find is a library for using the camera bit. Sorry if my original question wasn't specific enough. I'll try to clarify here.

Start here: http://johnny-five.io/

I am trying to put Firmata on ESP32 and connect it to the johnny-five lib (or any other JS client). I managed to put official Firmata and other forks related to ESP32, but it doesn't work (build+upload succeed), but I'm getting "ready" from the device.

I wonder if this could be related to M1/2/3 Macs being worse for x86 system software development than the old Intel Macs. I work on ROS[1] which runs on x86 Linux platforms, but usually develop on a Mac. I may have to move to a Linux laptop soon because there's not an easy path (that I'm aware of) to running x86 ROS code on an M3: compiling the entire system for arm would be a huge headache while running x86 code in a Linux VM under Rosetta has a lot of unknowns.

Obviously my case is a bit of an outlier, but once you add up enough outliers you might see a real impact.

[1] https://www.ros.org

Robotics is a broad field and is a confluence of many specialties: mechanical engineering, hardware engineering, software engineering, control, machine learning, computer vision, anything in between is a good entrance.

Coming from software, if you are interested, I would suggest either:

- Backend platform development (Python, C++ as main programming languages with a strong focus on ROS[1]).

- Frontend development (nothing too different from what's out there).

As small projects I would suggest playing with ROS to learn it and getting a running simulation with a simple robot that you can teleoperate, most of the stack already exists, it's just connecting everything together [2].

Another venue is open source contribution [1] to get known within the community and potentially attract interest from companies. ROS has multiple packages, from cloud infrastructure to drivers and simulation, if you see anything there you could contribute to, they will gladly take contributions.

In general robotics greatly benefits of good technologies from other areas, if there is a tool we use you believe could be better or a lack of good tooling in a specific area, it will get noticed.

So this would be my suggested path: learn C++/Python if you're not familiar with, learn ROS and watch which specialties appear more often in robot related jos posts [3]. If you are really invested, maybe go to a robotics conference as ROSCon to meet other enthusiasts, which companies are engaged with the community, etc.

Good luck!

Note: not everything robot related is done in ROS, but it's almost a standard within the field save for a few exceptions.

[1]: https://www.ros.org/

ROS is an operating system designed for robotics (it can be run many different ways) it includes simulations for many robots (including sensors etc) and you can even design your own fully inside the software. https://www.ros.org/

Robotics with ROS https://www.ros.org/ (You can do a lot with simulators and don't require actual HW)

Hardware experience is useful, but not needed to get started working with robotics. With your software background, I recommend you look into learning ROS (Robot Operating System) fundamentals on a personal computer, you can simulate a robot using Gazebo. Good luck!

In Robotics, the Open Motion Planning Library (OMPL) is a popular library for multi-dimensional motion planning, and is used by ROS and other robotics-related software. There are no Rust bindings to OMPL (though there is Rust support for software like ROS), and the library is written almost exclusively in C++. There are Python bindings, but those are generated using Py++. The header files throughout OMPL are C++ header files, not C, as they contain namespaces, classes, etc.

[3] https://www.ros.org/

ALSO - learn ROS. If you are interested in robotics as a career, this is one of the better things to have good experience for on your resume. There are also good tutorials on using ROS with simulated robots, so if you just want to focus on the software that's a good option :)

Roboticist here, have you heard of ROS?