Proper dev toolchain for ROS2 Humble in dusty's pre-built docker image on a remote Xavier NX

Autonomous Machines Jetson & Embedded Systems Jetson Xavier NX
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Hello, I am a bit lost when it comes to setting up a proper development toolchain and using ROS2 in general on the Jetson Xavier NX

My background so far is just developing ROS(1) on Ubuntu locally running on a casual x86_64 PC.

Now the goal is to develop a system using ROS2 nodes to gather some data from different sensors (usb cameras, some serial communication from MCUs, …) and represent them in different nodes.

I am already running Jetpack 5.02’s L4T 35.1 with Kernel 5.10 and Ubuntu 20.04 on it but failed to get ROS2 Humble installed from source .
(As Foxy is going to meet its EOL in half a year I thought of better go already for it)

Unfortunately I am also not too familiar with Docker, so I was wondering if it is a proper idea to use the prebuilt images from

For running a container to build and test my ROS workspace.
The workspace itself should lie on a docker volume, which I also share with my Windows PC from which I use SSH to get on the Jetson.

My original goal was to use VSCode via SSH by having its servers installed on the Jetson and using the VSCode ROS extension.
Having ROS inside the Container I am unsure if this is possible at all.

In general I somehow have the feeling like a I am going down rabbit holes.

Is there some proper practice to follow?
Are there some guidelines out there or useful tutorials on working with ROS(2) in docker (+on a remote Jetson/machine)?

Thanks

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Hi @pastap, I can’t speak to the specifics of using VSCode (personally I use MobaXterm from Windows for SSH), but yes you could mount a volume into the container to store your ROS workspace during development.

Then typically to actually deploy the container, you would create and build your own Dockerfile which uses my Humble container image as a base, which contains your ROS workspace built into the container.

An alternative would be to just use Galactic (or Foxy) which are both based on Ubuntu 20.04 and you could install directly onto your Jetson from apt since JetPack 5 also uses Ubuntu 20.04, and skip the containers for now.

1 Like
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Hi @dusty_nv, thank you for the quick reply and I think I will skip the containers for now

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