plots seem a bit glitchy with repeated lines using ros noetic

[qiuyuchen14]

Hi,

Thanks for this awesome plotting tool! I'm trying to use plotjuggler with ROS noetic (in VM), and saw something pretty weird: I could see repeated lines, and it seems that the old curves are not removed. The background color in each plot is also dark for some reason. I tried changing the buffer size but it didn't help. It would be great if you can point us where it might be the issue! Thanks!

[facontidavide]

I have never seen anything like this.

Can you provide a way toi reproduce this?

Further question... do you have OpenGL enabled? try running the command glxgears in your console

[qiuyuchen14]

Thanks for the quick response! Yeah, I have openGL enabled and glxgears shows messages like: 5305 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1060.962 FPS. . hmm, I'm not sure what would be a good way to reproduce this, we found some people can run the same code and the same command without any troubles, but some are having issues like this. We all use VMs ,and we compared our VM settings and couldn't find any difference there. We also suspect that this might be some render issues, but so far haven't got any clue yet.

[facontidavide]

I have just pushed a change in the main branch to disable opengl in app->preferences.

Can you try that?

[qiuyuchen14]

Thanks! Just built the latest, but I found If I disable openGL in app->preference, the next time I open app->preference, it would be reset to "enable". The background in the plot is still grey and I cannot find rostopic subscriber. My previous plot was using sudo apt install ros-noetic-plotjuggler-ros.

[facontidavide]

I REALLY want to help you, but unless I find a way to reproduce this, I can not.

Which VM are you using? Is the host Windows or Linux?

[qiuyuchen14]

Thanks so much for investigating this! I emailed you the VM I'm using with details. My host machine is Ubuntu18 with Intel® UHD Graphics 620 (Kabylake GT2).

[facontidavide]

FIXED. It was indeed the OpenGL issue! Now the change in preferences should persist.

I will try to release a new version soon-ish, but for the time being, you need to compile both plotjuggler and plotjuggler-ros from source, as explained here https://github.com/PlotJuggler/plotjuggler-ros-plugins

[qiuyuchen14]

Thank you so much!!! Yes, it's working now!!!