rosservice_echo

Just like rostopic echo /your_topic but with services.

Well, similarly.

You need to run it as root from a machine that is either doing the service calls or exposing the server. That's because it internally uses scapy to sniff network packets.

To be able to see the deserialized messages you need the messages installed. You'll get a nice blob of random characters otherwise (plaintext is readable!).

Possible future TODO: rosservicebag record/play maybe. With the work in message_thief, rosduct and maybe rosimport it should be not that hard.

Usage

rosrun rosservice_echo rosservice_echo.py /service_name [-v]

The service name must be existing at the moment. -v is for (VERY) verbose output.

Install

Meanwhile I don't release this (should I?) you can do:

mkdir -p rosservice_echo_ws/src
cd rosservice_echo_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/uts-magic-lab/rosservice_echo
cd ..
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src
# Or sudo apt-get install python-scapy
catkin_make
source devel/setup.bash

Examples

rosout

Shell 1:

roscore

Shell 2:

# In the shell that you did
# source rosservice_echo_ws/devel/setup.bash
rosrun rosservice_echo rosservice_echo.py /rosout/get_loggers

Shell 3:

rosservice call /rosout/get_loggers "{}"

The output from rosservice_echo will be:

[roscpp/GetLoggersRequest]:

[roscpp/GetLoggersResponse]:
loggers: 
  - 
    name: ros
    level: info
  - 
    name: ros.roscpp
    level: info
  - 
    name: ros.roscpp.roscpp_internal
    level: info
  - 
    name: ros.roscpp.superdebug
    level: warn
---

To find an example of the verbose output check README_echo_verbose.md.

PR2 simulation

# sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-pr2-simulator
roslaunch pr2_gazebo pr2_empty_world.launch

Try rosservice list and see if you see anything interesting.

I tried and apparently there is stuff doing service calls non stop very very fast (and I was using a slow computer) and I could not deserialize the messages (I use a very lame non-state-based technique), but it did show the traffic!