ROS Workbench

This is an early-stage FreeCAD workbench to deal with ROS (Robot Operating System).

Compatibility

Compatible with FreeCAD v0.19 (earlier version with the local coordinate system feature). Compatible with ROS2 (for now).

Features

Export Part::Box, Part::Sphere, and Part::Cylinder as text to be included in a URDF file.

Installation

You're on your own for now, see instructions for local install below.

Testing/developing the workbench

If you want to work on this workbench you have the following options:

Start FreeCAD from the root-directory of this repository in (by default freecad.workbench_ros)
Simply link the extension to a location where python can find it.
pip install -e . adds the root-directory to easy_install.path.

Install locally

To install your extension locally with pip, do the following from a cmd (windows) or terminal (unix):

cd <path_to_the_root_of_this_repo>
pip install .

Uploading your package to pypi

Please have a look at this [pypi twine tutorial][twine].

Be careful with version-numbering. It seems pypi doesn't allow to upload a package with a version smaller than the biggest version of the package uploaded. This seems to be true also for deleted packages and deleted versions.

Once uploaded, the package can be installed with:

pip install <package-name>

Additional Information

Glossary

module : a Python source file, which can expose classes, functions and global variables
package : a directory containing Python modules.
distribution : the artifacts which are created by running the setup.py. Can contain multiple packages.
workbench : a graphical space inside the FreeCAD-Gui which adds functionality related to a specific task
namespace-package : a package which adds functionality to a specific namespace. For FreeCAD we are talking about packages which are importable with from freecad import my_package. (Sometimes also called new-style-module)
namespace-workbench: a namespace-package containing the freecad-initialization files.
extension-module: a library (.so or .dll) written in C/C++ which adds the possibility to import this library with python.

Tip

Due to the fact we are now using the pktutil-module to find extensions of FreeCAD, it's possible to use standard-python-paths to place the extension. This is any location which is included in the sys.path.

To get a list of all the locations simple run this code in the FreeCAD-console:

import sys
sys.path

maidenone / freecad.workbench_ros