❤️ (VCS/VTC) Logging Levels Contract

[OppaAI]

⚠️ Issue: Log Pollution & Diagnostic Dilution

Without a strict logging contract, critical hardware failures are buried under a mountain of routine telemetry "info" noise. This makes post-mortem debugging (figuring out why the robot crashed into the cat) nearly impossible because the relevant error message is 5,000 lines up in the terminal buffer.

🎯 Location:

robot/vtc/pump.py
robot/vtc/vtc.py
vcs/regulator.py

🦠 Symptoms:

• Terminal "scroll-blindness" during testing.
• Important warnings (like a sensor returning None) are missed because they aren't color-coded or categorized.
• High CPU overhead from formatting string logs that no one is actually reading.

🩺 Diagnosis:

The system lacks a Severity Standard. In ROS 2, logging is a shared resource. If your node is too chatty at the INFO level, it slows down the rosout bus. We need to map specific robot events to the appropriate ROS 2 log levels (DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR, FATAL).

💡 Proposal:

The "VCS Logging Manifesto"
Define exactly what kind of event triggers which level.

• DEBUG: High-frequency pulse data, individual trace_thru_conduit results, and thread-lock acquisitions. (Hidden by default).
• INFO: State transitions (INIT -> RUNNING), successful YAML loading, and connection to ````jtop```.
• WARN: The "Lifestream Guard" misses a beat, a sensor returns ```None```` once, or the Regulator hits a "Soft Limit."
• ERROR: A YAML path fails the "Smoke Test," jtop is unreachable, or a DEGRADED state is triggered.
• FATAL: Thread crashes, memory allocation failures, or the inability to find the robot_spec.yaml. The node must shut down.