How to Use an iPad as a ROS2 Sensor and Receive Data on a Mac
(the post is automatically translated by AI) Background I’ve been learning ROS, but I don’t have a robot at hand. My idea: use the iPad I already have as a ROS node and receive data on my Mac — sensor data like IMU, Camera, Battery, etc. — to understand how ROS nodes collect and publish data. In this article, we’ll: Set up the MacBook as a ROS node (using Docker) Turn the iPad into a ROS node (using Conduit) Receive the iPad’s sensor data on the MacBook Setting Up the MacBook as a ROS Node (Docker) The ROS documentation mentions installing ROS2 natively on macOS, but in practice this runs into many deprecated packages and version dependency issues. After a few rounds of debugging with Claude Code, I decided to skip native installation — my goal at this stage was to see the data format ROS2 produces, not fight with the toolchain. ...