Lightening Talk

To help spread our expertise around and make it easy and fun to learn from each other we are now going to have a short section of "lightning talks" each meeting. A lightning talk is a really quick 5-10 minute talk presented by one of us. Topics are anything robot-related where you explain something you know, or know how to do, or show, so we all learn from each other. For example, at our next meeting, I will be doing a talk about SSH and TMUX, two tools I use every single day.

What can you share with us? Send me an email with your idea. It’s pretty open-ended, and should not require a lot of prep or slides or anything like that. Something you know well and wish everyone else knew about.

Self-nominated lightning talks for our November 11 meeting

• Topic: Micro-ROS by Rituraj Navindgikar -- "I’d like to do a quick talk on micro-ROS, the lightweight version of ROS 2 designed for microcontrollers. It brings the full power of ROS 2 (communication, nodes, topics, services) to small, resource-constrained devices like Arduino or STM32 boards. I’ll show how it bridges the gap between embedded systems and larger ROS 2 robots — letting even the tiniest sensors and actuators participate in a full robotic ecosystem."

• Topic: SSH and TMUX by Pito Salas -- "My robots (and not just mine) tend to have a single board computer (SBC) running Ubuntu. In my case, a Rasberry Pi 4. The way ROS works you can choose to run some of the code (nodes) on the SBC and some others on a different computer. To get it all to work you frequently have to access the command line on the SBC. And usually it doesn't have a screen, mouse or keyboard, so we work with it over the network connection. I will demonstrate how that works with SSH over the network, TMUX allowing multiple connections, and VSCode to edit files over the network.