PlotJuggler 3.4.x. Tons of new features

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I have the pleasure to announce a new release of PlotJuggler.

PlotJuggler is your friendly data visualization software, the perfect companion of RViz and rosbags.

With version 3.4.x, it introduces a lot of nice features.

Advanced Lua scripting to plot Trajectories

This may not be as straightforward as most of the PJ features, but it is one of the more requested feature: the ability to manipulate and visualize messages from trajectory_msgs or similar messages containing arrays.

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Learn more reading the tutorial

Ability to flip vertical or horizontal axis

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New options to parse field with strings

This is particularly useful to correctly plot data from diagnostic_msgs.

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New MQTT plugin and Protobuf parsing

As a ROS user you may not be interested to it, but here they are, in all their splendor:

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Keep in mind that transport layer (MQTT, Websocket, ZMQ, UPD) is orthogonal from parsing (JSON, Protobuf, etc)

SponsorWare program

PlotJuggler is tentatively moving to a “SponsorWare” plan. The goal is to incentivize sponsorship, without penalizing in any way the current community of users.

In short, a new “Private Repo” will be introduced, where new features are developed.

Open Repository

  • Critical bugs are addressed immediately and merged to the Open Repository.
  • Any external Pull Request is merged immediately.
  • If a particular feature is sponsored by a company, it will be merged immediately.

Private Repository (Sponsors only)

  • Where new features are developed.
  • Any new feature will be, eventually, merged to the Open Repository, 90 days later.

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Thanks for all your hard work Davide! I will definitely look to bump my contribution to get onto SponsorWare.

I’m curious to see how the workflow for this will work out. I presume you will have to go through quite a bit of rebasing every now and then, especially if the public repo gets some contributions.

Would you also plan to highlight the features coming to the public? I can imagine a hypothetical situation where you’ve added a feature in the sponsored repo and someone opens a PR for a similar feature in the public one, and then becoming disheartened for spending time on something that was done already. I think it would be nice to automate this somehow to show “Coming in X days: Feature Y”.

Not sure if I’m making too much sense here, just some morning thoughts :slight_smile:

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You are absolutely on point with your considerations.

It will take time for this to be organized in the correct way. Having an open roadmap about the sponsored content is of course mandatory and user should wait for that, before join that sponsor tier.

In my experience, 99% of the people who send PR solve small bugs, they don’t introduce any major features.

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