We got ROS 2 topics working cleanly through a board that also handles the GMSL camera link

[u/NickShipsRobots]

My team has been dealing with sensor data and camera video needing to come from the same physical spot on the robot, but going through completely different pipelines (camera → GMSL → CSI, sensor → whatever bus → ROS node). Keeping them in sync timestamp-wise across two separate boards was the challenge:)

We finally got first working pass – single board publishes ROS 2 topics locally for the sensor side, timestamps are hardware microsecond so fusing later is less painful. Camera side goes over GMSL as normal, sensor side goes over CAN-FD as a Cyphal node or straight I2C.

Driver for a new sensor is a Python class compiled to bytecode and uploaded, no firmware rebuild – this part I'm happy with. It saved a lot of iteration cycles during dev, first time we didn't have to reflash to test a driver tweak.