Multi-rant incoming!

1.
Stereotyping.

When did that shit become the norm?

2.
I'm lost in ROS smach. Does anyone do multi-threading in ROS services, or should I flip a table on smach? 😒

Soo I've written some python code to test things for my soon starting bachelor thesis. I work with a little robot car I share with other people and use 2 cameras on it. Today I make the extra effort to go to the lab to test my things as there were too many people busy with the available cars yesterday.
Set it all up with ROS and my project as per usual just to see whether python fucks me over again ... nothing, ok what a surprise.
Good part: my python code seems to work flawlessly
Bad part: cameras don't work, although they don't throw any errors. Quick check with rqt_image_view ... everything seems fucked up, but not broken. Cameras not accessible as they should be, only 1 view available instead of the normal million modes and a blank grey camera stream on the screen. But no errors, nothing.🙄😪

I also wanted to capture some footage to test at home, well that's gone to shit. Now I had to simulate that using my phone camera ... while crouching.
Fuck ... me.

Make your code available for your team members, please.

So we're working on this robotics project using ROS, a framework that enables multiple nodes in a network exchange their functionality among each other through tcp connections. Each node can be implemented and executed on your own machine, and tested with dummy inputs, but in collaboration they make a robot do fancy stuff.

The knowledgebase needs data from the image processing unit, providing this data to others with semantic context to high level planning, which uses this semantic data for decision making and calling the robot manipulation node with meaningful input, to navigate the robot's components in the environment. We use a dedicated machine, which pulls the corresponding repositories and is always kept configured correctly, to run each node, such that everybody has access to each other's work when needed.

So far so good. We tried to convince the manipulation guy (let's call him John) to run his code on our central machine, not a week, but since the first day, 5 months ago. Our cluster classification has been unavailable for 2 months, but my collegue fixed that. We still can't run the whole project without John's computer. If his machine blows up we're fucked.

Each milestone feels like a big-bang-test, fixing issues in interfaces last-minute. We see the whole demo just moments before our supervisors arrive at the door.

I just hope he doesn't get hit by a truck.