Only released in EOL distros:   groovy hydro indigo

Package: console_bridge

Maintainers: Mirza Shah (mshah@willowgarage.com), Ioan Sucan (isucan@willowgarage.com)

Author: Ioan Sucan (isucan@willowgarage.com)

Code Repository: https://github.com/ros/console_bridge

Overview

console_bridge is a ROS-independent, pure CMake (i.e. non-catkin and non-rosbuild package) that provides logging calls that mirror those found in rosconsole, but for applications that are not necessarily using ROS.

Normally in ROS C++ code, developers can log data via rosconsole using the macros ROS_DEBUG, ROS_INFO, ROS_WARN, and ROS_ERROR. These logging messages are not only outputted to the screen (depending on log level of course), but are also published to /rosout so that other ROS nodes can subscribe to them. Applications like rqt_console and its predecessor rxconsole provide graphical interfaces for seeing logs during application runtime.

The problem with this approach is that libraries that are meant to run without ROS infrastructure and/or may not want or need the log publishing cannot use the traditional rosconsole. This is where console_bridge comes in.

console_bridge provides equivalent calls to the ones found in ROS console that provide the same functionality:

logDebug  -- ROS_DEBUG
logInform -- ROS_INFO
logWarn   -- ROS_WARN
logError  -- ROS_ERROR

When these functions are used, the output is directed to stdout rather than to both stdout and /rosout. However, here is the most interesting feature:

If you want your console_bridge application to hook into /rosout, all you have to do is switch the depedency of your package from console_bridge to rosconsole_bridge!

Once you use rosconsole_bridge, the implementations of logDebug, logInform, logWarn, and logError will simply become equivalent to ROS_DEBUG, ROS_INFO, ROS_WARN, and ROS_ERROR respectively.

Build Instructions

• $ git clone git://github.com/ros/console_bridge.git
  $ cd console_bridge
  $ cmake .
  $ make
  $ sudo make install

See Also

• rosconsole

• rosconsole_bridge