Veloviz

[HangYin2015]

No description provided.

[chrberger]

@HangYin2015 What is the status of this PR?

[HangYin2015]

Since veloviz was not updated since this summer, it has many commits behind master. When I merged master into veloviz some weeks ago, I got a lot of conflicts which had to be manually resolved. Hence, it is not a good idea to approve the PR now. I just added the VLP-16 decoder today. However, this was only for backup purpose. The reason why I test the new decoder here instead of the feature.velodyne branch of opendlv.core is that only the odcockpit in the veloviz branch supports the visualization of shared point cloud. I will prepare the live version for VLP-16 decoder soon. Once everything works, I will migrate them to feature.velodyne of opendlv.core. Soon I will also try to create a new branch of OpenDaVINCI with odcockpit supporting shared point cloud. Then I will make a new PR from that new branch. Once the master branch of OpenDaVINCI supports shared point cloud, it will be safe to delete veloviz.

[chrberger]

@HangYin2015 Alright, thanks for the clarification. I am looking forward to the new PR.

[HangYin2015]

I will try to get the new PR ready before lunch today. By the way, I forgot to mention that the veloviz branch contains several things in addition to the visualisation of shared point cloud in odcockpit, including: (1) offline version of Velodyne 64 decoder (read a pcap file); (2) online version of Velodyne 64 decoder (live Velodyne 64 data); (3) offline version of VLP-16 (pushed yesterday); (4) online version of VLP-16 (pushed yesterday); (5) a tool PcapReplay that reads a pcap file and sends out UDP bytes to simulate live Velodyne data (either 64 or 16). Currently, only (2) has been migrated to feature.velodyne of opendlv.core. I will also migrate (4) soon to opendlv.core. However, the offline versions (1) and (3), and PcapReplay are unique in veloviz. What do we do with them? Do you want to have (1)-(5) in OpenDaVINCI? Or should they be in opendlv.core or somewhere else? The offline versions of the Velodyne decoder are also important, since we may need to replay pcap recordings from time to time in future. But we should try to avoid redundancy, i.e., there is no need to have the same Velodyne decoder in different layers.

[chrberger]

@HangYin2015 is this PR still relevant/needed?

[HangYin2015]

This branch should eventually be deleted. However, I prefer to get rid of this branch after the feature.velodyne branch of opendlv.core is ready, since I may need to refer to the veloviz branch sometimes. I am also thinking about preserving the offline versions of the velodyne 64/16 decoders somewhere in addition to proxy-velodyne(64) and proxy-velodyne16. The reason is that the code interfacing with a pcap file and live feed is quite different. As I recently found, the PCAP decoder is only used for reading a pcap file and there is a future need to be able to read valodyne recordings. Our previous plan is to use another tool such as Wireshark to read a pcap file and replay it as live feed so that we only need to keep the online versions of the velodyne 64/16 decoders. However, I still do not see such a function supported by Wireshark. Another tool tcpreplay is able to do this, but my previous experiment shows that it has to run on a different computer. PcapReplay will not help too much either because it still sends out pcap bytes, which are different from the live feed. Therefore, we should not put PcapReplay in odtools.

[chrberger]

hi @HangYin2015, what is the status of this PR after extracting the tutorial on reading zip files?

[HangYin2015]

Currently PcapReplay is still part of veloviz. Shall I migrate PcapReplay to odtools? Once PcapReplay is included in the master branch of OpenDaVINCI, we can safely delete veloviz.

[chrberger]

Hi Hang, we do need pcapreplay, right?

[HangYin2015]

Yes. We need PcapReplay which allows us to test Velodyne decoder without Velodyne. Now a test suite is still missing for PcapReplay, but I do not know what needs to be tested in the test suite yet. PcapReplay is a time triggered module which simply periodically reads bytes from a pcap file, feeds bytes to the PCAP decoder, receives PCAP packets from the PCAP decoder, and sends out Velodyne packets via UDP. Do you have any idea on the test suite?