On 07/18/2012 06:41 PM, Felix Kaser wrote:
> On 2012-07-18 19:54, Dustin Gooding wrote:
>> 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()?
> Hi Dustin,
>
> what exactly is your short-term goal? I'm really interested in every
> possible use case.
>
> The purpose of logdata was to publish more complex data. E.g. if you
> want to publish a message which contains a couple of fields at once, you
> can use logdata. There are no special widgets for it right now, but you
> can add one widget per data field and connect each widget to a different
> field in the message.
>
> Example:
> Your message looks like this:
> '''
> float32 acceleration
> int32 mode
> string currentStatus
> '''
>
> You can log this data with:
> '''
> #build data message
> data = YourMessage()
> data.acceleration = 3.7
> data.mode = 5
> data.currentStatus = 'running smoothly'
>
> #log message
> rosdashboard.logdata('accelerationStatus', data, YourMessage)
> '''
>
> To display the data you can either create your own widget (I'm still
> working on that part) or add three widgets to the dashboard. You can
> connect them to the published topic by setting the topic to
> "/rosdashboard/accelerationStatus" and the datafield respectively to
> "acceleration", "mode" or "currentStatus".
>
> Did that answer your question or only raise more questions? The process
> still has some rough edges which I'm trying to find and smooth out.
>
> I've wikified the example with a screenshot here:
> https://github.com/kaserf/rosdashboard/wiki/Publish-and-Display-Arbitrary-Data
>
> Cheers
> Felix
>

Thanks for the extra help.  That cleared it up.  When you mentioned 
arbitrary data, I was considering serialized C++ objects and the like, 
but you meant arbitrary ROS messages.  My fault for misunderstanding.

Our specific use case is that we want to visually represent the 
health/status of our robot, both holistically and on a per-joint, 
per-status-bit level.  Until your post, we were considering hijacking 
the DiagnosticStatus message, but it's all strings and doesn't lend 
itself to plotting or "gadgeting".  But, given you're work on the 
display side, we can design a message that holds the data we want to 
visualize and then use rosdashboard to see it. Specific data for each 
joint to display includes: motor enabled (bool), brakes set (bool), mode 
(int/string), faulted (bool), specific fault (string), and a few 
others.   On the flip side, at some point it would be great if we could 
also command from rosdashboard: enable motor, set brakes, change mode, 
clear faults, safe the robot, etc.

Given a complex set of data like this, that "add save and restore 
functionality" issue is pretty important.

Thanks,
-dustin