hector_recorder

A terminal UI for recording ROS2 bags (strongly inspired by rosbag_fancy).

Some of its features:

• Sort by message count, topic type, frequency, bandwith, duration, disk size...
• Adaptive display based on terminal window size
• Same arguments as rosbag2 (ros2 bag record)
• Colors indicate 'no msgs received' (yellow) and 'no publisher' (red)
• Specify arguments per command line or YAML file
• Publishes status topic (optional)

If you are familiar with ros2 bag record, you can use hector_recorder as a drop-in replacement with additional convenience.

Requirements

• ROS 2 (tested for jazzy)
• ncurses
• fmt
• yaml-cpp

sudo apt update &&
sudo apt install libncurses-dev libfmt-dev libyaml-cpp-dev

Build

# clone this repo into your ros2 workspace, then build:
colcon build --packages-select hector_recorder hector_recorder_msgs
source install/setup.bash

Usage

bag_recorder <args>

Place all ROS arguments at the end of the command line.

bag_recorder <args> --ros-args -r __ns:=my_namespace

We support almost all ros2 bag record arguments as explained in the official documentation. In addition, there is:

--max-bag-size-gb   Specify the split size in GB instead of bytes
--publish-status    If true, recorder stats will be published on a topic
--config            Load all parameters from a YAML file (see below for more details)

By pressing keys 1-8 you can sort the table by the respective column.

Examples

• Record everything (all topics & services):

  bag_recorder --all

• Record specific topics:

  bag_recorder --topics /tf /odom

• Load from YAML:

  bag_recorder --config /path/to/config.yaml

Config file

All arguments can be specified either via command line or in a config file.

Example:

node_name: "my_node_name"     # defaults to 'hector_recorder'
output: "/tmp/bags"           # will be normalized, timestamp subdir if directory
topics: 
 - "/tf" 
 - "/odom"
max_bag_duration: 60          # split the bag at 60s
publish_status: true          # publish hector_recorder_msgs status

See here for all available parameters and their default values: hector_recorder/config/default.yaml

Directory resolution

• If --output/-o is not specified, a timestamped folder in the current directory is created.
• -o some_dir creates some_dir (works with absolute/relative paths)
• If you want to have timestamped bag files in a specified log dir (useful for automatic logging), you can append a slash:
  -o some_dir/ creates some_dir/rosbag_<stamp>

TODOs

• Add/test qos-profile-overrides-path

Acknowledgement

This project includes components from:

• ROS 2 rosbag2
• CLI11 by Henry Schreiner (BSD-3-Clause)