how to diagnose IFM

[ifm]

how to diagnose IFM

[tpanzarella]

What status information are you interested in? Is this to be monitored /
accumulated interactively or programmatically?

Tom Panzarella
(sent from my phone)

On Jul 28, 2016 2:43 PM, "zfxw0206" [email protected] wrote:

I checked all the ros topic for IFM, I didn't find any diagnostic topic.
If so, how could we know the status of IFM? Thank you!

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[graugans]

Maybe the temperature of the device could be used in such a status update?

[zfxw0206]

Now I change my IFM to trigger mode. If something wrong with my Ethernet cable connection and I do not trigger it, how could I know if the camera is connected?

[tpanzarella]

how could I know if the camera is connected?

You could call the /Dump service, which is synchronous and will fail if a connection to the camera cannot be established. As a subtly, this connects to the camera via its XML-RPC interface not on the PCIC socket, but it would let you know if you should still consider your Ethernet cable as suspect or not (as you ask above).

[zfxw0206]

Ok, thank you. I will try.

[zfxw0206]

I tried to use "/Dump" service, it works. But there is another problem, when I call that service, it will take 3-4 seconds to get the result, and during this time, I could not use software to trigger my camera.
That means, if I want to diagnose the camera continuously, I need to keep calling this service, and my software trigger won't work sometimes.

Do you have another idea about the diagnose? Thank you!

[tpanzarella]

You could write a simple ROS node that pings the camera (literally sends out ICMP ECHO_REQUEST) to ensure connectivity exists. This again would alert you to Ethernet cable issues.

Another option, is to use your software trigger as a health check. Simply put, once you trigger the camera, a frame should be received (and data published on the associated topics) w/in your configured timeout_millis. In general, this would be a better check to see if 1) connectivity to the camera can be established and 2) data are being received.

[zfxw0206]

Ok, thank you!