Using Foxglove Studio's mcap with fast-dds

[samehmohamed88]

Foxglove is a very nice alternative to rviz2. Chief among its benefits is there's no dependency on the ros ecosystem, so as long as you have Topics and data is some predefined format , it can visualize it in some pretty good ways.

Unfortunately their mcap format does not support Fast-CDR's IDL, but they do support protobuf. I am trying to bridge the best of both worlds, where I can use Fast-DDS with eprosima fast buffers, but somehow either in an offline or background process, log message data to protobuf for consumption in Foxglove.

1. Is there a simple Fast-CDR IDL to protobuf conversion tool out there?
2. Beyond rviz2 are you aware of data visualization tools that support Fast-CDR IDL?

[EduPonz]

Hi @armuren ,

I guess you could try to use ros2 bag (which supports mcap) as we describe here. Else, you may be interested in Integration Service, a tool to bridge communication between different protocols. However, we currently do not have a system handle for protobuf, so you'd need to do some coding.

Regarding data visualization, both webots and and PlotJuggler (through the Fast DDS Visualizer Plugin) support Fast DDS.