There is a great tool in Ross named acuity, which you can use for introspection and also to interact
with lots of things inside your Ross application.
Very basically put, this is similar to the Ross two command line functionalities, but this time using
a graphical user interface and how to start an RCT.
Well, you just open a terminal and you type RCT, and we have a basic window here.
And you see, well, there's going to be a lot of plugins you see for introspection, for configurations
of parameters, for logging, for to test services and topics.
Well, there's a lot of things.
But what's going to be interesting for us now is inside the introspection we have node graph okay.
So that's also called RCT graph.
And to start this directly well I'm going to close here.
You can do RCT graph like that okay.
So that's something we're going to use quite often.
So I start RCT graph.
And well for now this is empty because that's going to represent the graph of all the nodes that are
running inside our application.
So let's start a node Ros2.
Run my pip pkg PG and by node.
Okay.
And I probably need to source that terminal because I have just used the Simulink install.
As you can see, I have used the Simulink install before, but I haven't sourced the terminal yet,
so then it should work.
Okay, so that's the node running here.
And if I do actigraph again and well, there's nothing I can refresh the view.
And you see we have our node.
So for now it's just one node like that by test.
Now let's run I'm just gonna run another node for example that one the CP node.
Okay.
And let's go back to activity graph I refresh.
And you see we have CP test and pi test.
So we have all of the nodes and this node communication.
But we're going to see the communications later on.
Okay.
So that's how you can also see the nodes that are running with a graphical view.
What you can do here also is let's uncheck debug okay.
And you can see for example.
So we have the two nodes we have started.
And then we have this joy pie node.
So that is the RCT window here.
So the RCT window is a node by itself okay.
And then we have a ros2 command line daemon okay.
So those are usually hidden because they are part of the kind of debugging part of your application.
But you can uncheck this and see all of the debugging things.
And we have arrows here that points to Ros out.
And this is a topic.
So we're going to see that on the topic section.
So those nodes are publishing data to a topic.
And you can easily visualize that with RCT graph.
All right.
So I'm going to check debug again.
And for now we have just those two nodes.
Now I'm going to stop.
So you can stop everything with Ctrl C.
And to recap RCT graph can be very useful when you want to know what's going on in your Ros2 graph.
In your application, you will get a global overview.
That's basically the same thing you will see in the command line.
But here you will get a global graphical overview and you can easily spot mistakes.
We will come back to act graph multiple times in this course.