rosshow

Have you ever SSH'ed into a robot to debug whether sensors are outputting what they should, e.g. rostopic echo /camera/image_raw?

If so, rosshow is for you.

This displays various sensor messages in a useful fashion using Unicode Braille art in the terminal so you don't need to fire up port forwards, Rviz, or any other shenanigans just to see if something is working. It currently only supports types from std_msgs and sensor_msgs but support for more types is coming. Contributions welcome!

After installation, you can immediately run it with:

rosshow <topicname>

Most visualizations use Unicode Braille characters to render visualizations. If your terminal supports only ASCII, you can use the -a option for a purely ASCII-art render:

rosshow -a <topicname>

You can also force 1-bit, 4-bit, or 24-bit color modes if your terminal type is not detected correctly. You may need these when using rosshow inside of a screen.

rosshow -c1 <topicname> rosshow -c4 <topicname> rosshow -c24 <topicname>

Also be sure to check out my web visualization tool, rosboard at https://github.com/dheera/rosboard.