What we are going to learn

1. How to only source one ROS distro at a time
2. How to create new ROS2 workspaces

List of resources used in this post

1. The Construct: https://app.theconstructsim.com/
2. ROS Development Studio (ROSDS) —▸ http://rosds.online
3. Robot Ignite Academy –▸ https://www.robotigniteacademy.com
4. ROS2 Tutorials –▸
   1. https://app.theconstructsim.com/#/Course/61
   2. https://app.theconstructsim.com/#/Course/50
5. This video answers the following question asked on ROS Answers: https://answers.ros.org/question/389464/why-does-ros2-installsetupbash-source-ros1-and-ros2/

Creating a rosject

In order to learn how to create conditional publishers, let’s start by creating a publisher and a subscriber in Python. We are going to use The Construct (https://www.theconstruct.ai/) for this tutorial, but if you have ROS2 installed on your own computer, you should be able to do ~everything on your own computer, except this creating a rosject part.

Let’s start by opening The Construct (https://www.theconstruct.ai/) and logging in. You can easily create a free account if you still don’t have one.

Once inside, let’s create My Rosjects and then, Create a new rosject:

 

For the rosject, let’s select ROS2 Foxy for the ROS Distro, let’s name the rosject as ROS Q&A 224. You can leave the rosject public.

If you mouse over the recently created rosject, you should see a Run button. Just click that button to launch the rosject.

Checking enviroment configuration

Open a webshell and go to the installation folder of ROS, like shown below:

You can see there are installed two ROS distros, ROS 1 Noetic and ROS 2 Foxy

That means both systems are installed, like the user shown his workspace. Now, open the code editor and check the workspaces:

There are two main workspaces, catkin_ws (for ROS noetic) and ros2_ws (for ROS 2 foxy)

Configuring an environment with both setups

The quickest way to have a ROS environment with both ROS and ROS2 is by creating a new workspace. In the webshell, execute the following:

Open in the IDE the file ~/new_ros2_ws/install/setup.bash. This is a fresh new ROS2 workspace, it does not have ROS noetic attached to it. It is shown in the image below, no ROS commands (e.g: roscore) are available:

You can have as many ROS 2 workspaces as you want and the fresh new workspace built does not have the setup to attache ROS 1 to it, unless you configure to do so.

 

Youtube video

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Keep pushing your ROS Learning.