We are excited to introduce Husarnet-DDS, a tool designed to simplify the configuration of Husarnet for your ROS 2 applications. Husarnet-DDS is an open-source utility that automatically generates DDS XML configuration files compatible with both Cyclone DDS and Fast DDS.

Before Husarnet-DDS, users had to manually create and fill out XML profile files each time a new device was added to the Husarnet network. This process was not only tedious but also error-prone, often resulting in issues such as typos that required troubleshooting.

Roughly a year ago we have released the version of Husarnet that most of you are familiar with. At that time we started thinking more and more about core users of Husarnet and what would make their experience better. Our most important conclusion was that our users are mostly power users who first of all know how to program and secondly want a semless integration of Husarnet with their own products and creations. In order to accomodate this we started a pivot in our design choices to make Husarnet API-centric. This means that not only Dashboard API is now available for all users but also Husarnet Daemon can be controlled via an HTTP API. This should enable all of you to treat Husarnet as a building block for your products much more easily.

DDS Router is a fresh solution by eProsima. It allows you to bridge different DDS networks with providing built-in ROS 2 topics filtering in the same time. You can define which ROS 2 topics from one remote host are visible in others. That's a powerful tool for challenges like creating secure fleets of robots or just specifying a ROS 2 interface for your ROS 2 robot for the outside world.

DDS Router and Husarnet fit perfectly, making it a great foundation for any ROS 2 project that needs to run on multiple devices operating both in the same LAN and over the Internet.

It is not an alternative to previously described Fast DDS Discovery Server but an additional building block that makes your ROS 2 network more secure, easy to maintain and easy to configure.

Micro-ROS is an embedded framework allowing you to connect low-power, cheap IoT devices into a ROS 2 system. By using Micro-ROS together with Husarnet peer-to-peer VPN your robot doesn't need to be in the same LAN as an IoT sensor.

Thanks to that your robot can be mobile/5G connected and talk directly with IoT sensors or actuators connected over Wi-Fi. Without any proxy server in between.

In this article I present a ready to use GitHub template for ESP32 Wi-Fi microcontroller allowing you to bring your ROS 2 powered IoT sensors to life in minutes.

ROS 2 is rapidly increasing its share in new projects in the AMR (Autonomous Mobile Robots) sector. While the amount of autonomous mobile robots is growing, the robotic fleet becomes less and less efficient. To overcome that, the next gen robots need to operate not as a group of individual devices, but as one, decentralized robotic system. That leads to connectivity challenges.

Classical approach with a standard DDS service discovery mechanism, relying on multicast messages being sent in a single LAN network, becomes a factor limiting a system's scalability.

Fortunately the eProsima Fast DDS Discovery Server combined with Husarnet peer-to-peer SDN solved all those issues by providing efficient way of service discovery and message exchange across devices connected to multiple physical networks.

GitHub Actions is a mature and extremely popular CI/CD tool. It allows you to create workflows for software deployment, testing, building ... whatever. In GitHub Actions you build your workflows by using blocks automating common tasks called Actions.

One of those building blocks is now Husarnet Action! 🎉

Learn how you can leverage Husarnet Action in your workflow to deploy code to devices with no public IP like laptop, Raspberry Pi, some random VM sitting on your server or even to ESP32 microcontrollers. All by adding a few lines to your existing GitHub Actions yaml file.

In one of the previous blog posts we presented how to configure a reverse proxy in NGINX to provide public access to services hosted by Husarnet connected devices.

Today I will share my notes on how to do something similar, but using a nice user interface provided by Nginx Proxy Manager and your own custom domain with SSL certificates.

By combining two open source projects: Husarnet & Nginx Proxy Manager you can create your own, self-hosted secure tunnel service for localhosts, similar to ngrok.

🚀 I will show you also how to deploy the service in seconds, with the Infrastructure as Code approach powered by Ansible and GitHub Actions.

Let's go!

In one of the previous blog posts I presented how to configure a Raspberry Pi to access it from anywhere without public IP or port forwarding on your router. It's quite easy, but still you need to make a few steps manually, like providing your Wi-Fi credentials, installing the Husarnet VPN Client (recently open sourced), and typing commands in the terminal to connect the board to your Husarnet VPN network.

If you have to confiture a single Raspberry Pi that might be a fun way of spending a time, but what if you would like to connect a dozen(s) of them? My math teacher in elementary school often said that "a good mathematician should be lazy". That's also a true sentence for engineers - if you can automate something that is repetitive and boring - do it.

In this blog post I'll show you how to create your own, customized system image to be burned on the SD card of your Pi, so that after you power on your board, it will be available via SSH over the Internet on the 1st boot! In the same way you can generate hundreds of similar images, without wasting your time to manually setup each board.

ROS 2 is a next gen Robot Operating System, a leading middleware and ecosystem for developing software for autonomous robots and even for autonomous vehicles. ROS provides a decentralized architecture with so called Nodes responsible for specific tasks as complex as path planning, SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) or just processing single sensor data.

ROS 2 nodes can automatically discover each other when ROS 2 powered robots or computers are connected to the same Wi-Fi network. Doing the same over the internet is more challenging. I will however show you how to do that in an easy way!

In this article you will learn:

• how to connect ROS 2 nodes running in different networks to a single ROS 2 system
• how to install, configure and use VPN client
• how to configure DDS to enable communication over VPN
• how to do everything above with Docker and Docker-Compose to make your life easier

Let's do it!

In the recent blog posts we presented how to embed Husarnet VPN Client inside a Docker container. This solution is fine, however has a few drawbacks like:

• you need to modify your existing containers
• you need to install one instance of Husarnet Client for each of the containers you want to connect (and manage multiple hostnames)

To overcome those issues we introduced an official Husarnet Docker Image, that utilizes a sidecar Docker design pattern. You can run this container next to your existing containers to share the VPN network from a Husarnet Container to one or multiple other containers at once.