PlotJuggler 3.9.1 is out! And few more things you should know

General
1

New version

PlotJuggler 3.9.1 and plotjuggler-ros-plugins 2.1.1 are available and they both fix some important bugs in both ROS1 and ROS2.

As explained in the README you are encouraged to use snap, since the next release of the ROS Debian packages may take a while.

A word about the latest unstable releases

I should apologize for the fact that PlotJuggler has been unstable/broken in the last few releases :sob:

I know it was annoying for a lot of you, but unfortunately this was an undesired consequence of a number of refactorings that I have been doing, to remove code duplication in the ROS plugins.

Finally, there is a single message parser that can decode both ROS1, ROS2, raw MCAP files and DataTamer.

This latest release should fix most of the regressions, but if you see anything suspicious, let me know.

It is worth mentioning that I am still maintain PlotJuggler in my spare (AKA “unpaid”) time and despite some PR that I appreciate a LOT, most of the work falls on my shoulders (this is true for other libraries, that I am developing and supporting, being Behaviortree.CPP a notable example).

Your company can help !!!

And this brings me to my second topic!
Nothing would make me happier to give you a tool that you can rely on, and reduce the time you spend debugging your robots.

In many ways, I believe (hope?) I did that, but it is also discouraging to see that very few companies have decided to support this effort in any meaningful way.

It turns out that now is a particular good time (for personal reasons not worth mentioning here) for your company to support the future of PlotJuggler.

This can happen through sponsorship, but I know that this might be a tough call (“paying for open source software?”).

So my pragmatic question is: is there any feature that YOU (not “someone”, I mean YOU) would pay for, if implemented in PlotJuggler?

If you can figure out any improvement in PlotJuggler that can save you time (and money), let me know!

Shoutout to Dexory, that paid recently to implement an exciting feature that I hope to release soon!

12 Likes
2

I would like to echo that this is a good opportunity for folks to “put their money where there mouth is” when it comes to supporting open source software. @facontidavide has made years of contributions largely on his personal time and is an exemplary member of the ROS community.

If you or your company derive significant value or time savings from PlotJuggler, this is a good time to chip in.

11 Likes
3

I gotta co-sign this sentiment. Like many open-source projects, the less time @facontidavide worries about fundraising, the more time he has to actually write code.

8 Likes
4

I feel compelled to point out the irony of the situation: When Davide was the CEO of a 30+ people company, he paid me for 6 months or so to develop version 2.0 of Orocos, the open source real-time software which the PAL Robotics robots were using back then. Totally on my own terms/designs/decisions/priorities.

I am right now not in the position to pay back the favor, hope someone else can pay it forward to him.

:heart:

3 Likes
5

This is wrong of course, every company has some liberty to setup sponsorships. At Intermodalics we are using BehaviorTree.CCP since last year and PlotJuggler since 2020 or so.

So I setup a $100 monthly sponsorship. I know it doesn’t scale to every ROS contributor, and I hope you reading this don’t look for a special reason to justify sponsoring even one person.

Maybe if each company setup a sponsorship to one person, we’d be way closer to scaling to every ROS contributor.

4 Likes
6

Thank you, Peter. Super appreciated!

7

Also, I would like to mention that @Peter_Soetens was specifically the person that inspired me to summarize the latest features of PloJuggler in this video here: PlotJuggler updates

For the records, this has been watched 1200+ times, so far.

8 Likes
8

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.