Porting smach_viewer to ROS 2

[jkaniuka]

Hi guys 👋, after nearly two years, the issue of porting SMACH to ROS 2 is alive again. Current details can be found here ➡️ ros/executive_smach#70. It might be a good idea to synchronize porting of both executive_smach and executive_smach_visualization. I suggest that the maintainer of this repository create a ros2 branch so that there is something to merge pull requests to.

[TZECHIN6]

Up vote, I would like to have a ros2 humble version to work with

[chrisbitter]

also very interested in this. is anybody working on this already?

[jkaniuka]

I have been trying to run this with ROS Noetic but had problems first with the installation and then with the functioning of the wxPython library on Ubuntu 20.04 with Python 3 (they are also described here #34 ). After messing around with dependencies versions and quick code fixes I was able to open smach_viewer window but most of the buttons didn't work and the program crashed after a while 😞 We need to get rid of wxPython library and rewrite this using PyQt5, but I'm not able to handle this anytime soon 🙈

[Timple]

While migrating to ROS2 we're currently working off a fork of a fork: https://github.com/nobleo/executive_smach_visualization/tree/iron

Combining the work of @InigoMoreno and @tecnalia-advancedmanufacturing-robotics. There are still some encoding challenges, but the main part works. When we finish migrating we intend to clean up and open a pull request. But (as far as we know) this is the most functional version thus far.

[martincerven]

I tried @Timple 's https://github.com/nobleo/executive_smach_visualization/tree/iron fork, and it crashes, but works if this latest commit is reverted ( what does it actually do? ). I tried it on Humble and simple SM, will try concurrence containers later.