It seems the orbbec/astra github repo was last updated in commit https://github.com/orbbec/astra/commit/a127f9cf277621063b3c3da091b77d41822f8f9f (April 2016) but the releases on the develop page are tagged with 2018-04-03. Is the github repo abandoned, or are the latest releases possibly stored somewhere else?
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The GitHub repo isn’t abandoned, but we haven’t updated it only because our development staff are all focused on the next release which adds some new interesting, unannounced features. That sounds like a lame excuse, I know, but there are a couple minor technical reasons involving dependencies why pushing right now wouldn’t allow community members to compile the whole project from source. I’d like to get things to a better state first. I respect to update GitHub shortly after our next SDK release. I don’t have a date I can share for that but it will be within a few months.
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What are the plans to officially support the IR-Flood in the ROS-Driver?
IR Flood support will come to the main Astra SDK first along with an OpenNI2 update. After that the ROS project will be updated. Again, I cannot share any specific dates but we’re talking a few months in general.
So you already sell components that are not supported by your main SDK? I can hack a solution with the (not public) ExtendedAPI, but it’s somehow strange that this is not officially supported.
We design and sell hardware that has general-purpose features needed by many customers as well as specialized features used by fewer customers. The main SDK first supports the general-purpose hardware features and eventually is updated to support everything, but that takes time due to the SDK needing to not break compatibility and support many different scenarios. For the more specialized features we provide intermediate solutions such as the ExtendedAPI until the SDK supports it. I hope that makes sense.
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I just posted by CMakelists for the ros_astra_camera (Support for Extended API (with IR-Flood) · Issue #53 · orbbec/ros_astra_camera · GitHub) to compile the driver against the ExtendedApi (which can be found in the Download-Thread). I’ll probably also post my adaption so that the IR can be used via ROS-Topic.
So thanks for offering the tools to create our own custom version ; )