On 07/17/2012 11:42 PM, Felix Kaser wrote:
> Dear ROS community,
>
> my name is Felix Kaser and I'm currently working on my master thesis at
> the robotics lab of Auckland University in New Zealand. The thesis
> concludes the Software Engineering master program I am currently part of
> at TU Munich, University of Augsburg and LMU Munich. My supervisors are
> Prof. Bruce MacDonald in Auckland and Prof. Reif in Augsburg.
>
> During the last months I was trying to figure out how robot developers
> are debugging their software and how to improve the way they are doing
> so. After exploring some low level concepts like tracepoints I decided
> for various reasons that a higher level approach is more suitable for my
> master thesis. Coming from an Android development background I use
> Androids logging framework a lot to debug Android apps. ROS has a
> logging framework as well which can be used to log and debug algorithms.
> What I dislike about current logging approaches is the text-only
> representation of data. Staring at numbers scrolling down in a console
> is not really the easiest way to find bugs.
>
> I've developed a graphical tool which can be used to visualize basic
> data (string, float, integer) in a graphical way. It is extremely easy
> to set up and to configure to display data from an existing topic or one
> of the debugging specific topics. To publish data to a topic in an easy
> way I've created an API which wraps the publishing logic into single calls.
>
> You can find the code here: https://github.com/kaserf/rosdashboard
> I've started writing a documentation in form of a wiki on github as
> well: https://github.com/kaserf/rosdashboard/wiki
>
> I would love to get as much feedback as possible, in order to improve
> the tool and contribute to the ROS community.
>
> Best regards,
> Felix Kaser
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Hi Felix,

This looks like an interesting project.  We might be using it to meet a 
short-term goal.

Where do you define how arbitrary data is displayed when it's published 
from logdata()?

-dustin