Developer builds ROS2 drone GCS in Electron with no ROS required on client machines

A software developer has built a Ground Control Station (GCS) for an autonomous warehouse inventory hexacopter, using Electron on the laptop side and ROS2 Jazzy on a Raspberry Pi 5 aboard the drone. The aircraft uses a Unitree 4D LiDAR with Point-LIO SLAM to build 3D maps, while onboard cameras handle barcode detection and ArduCopter on a Pixhawk manages flight control. The key design constraint was that operators should need no ROS installation on their laptops — connection is achieved via rosbridge, which exposes all ROS2 topics as JSON over a WebSocket on port 9090. The GCS UI is built without any frontend framework, relying instead on a single HTML file and the Canvas 2D API to render telemetry widgets, point clouds, and occupancy grids at 60 fps. The developer notes that a plain canvas-based approach outperforms framework-driven rendering for real-time telemetry, where constant repainting makes DOM reconciliation unnecessary overhead.
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