I built Altara, a React component library for real-time robotics and telemetry UIs. It connects natively to rosbridge and ships with components that most GCS builders end up rebuilding from scratch.
What’s included:
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Attitude indicator, HSI, altimeter, airspeed — aerospace instruments
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Occupancy grid, LiDAR point cloud viewer, object detection overlay — AV/robotics
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Time-series charts, signal panels, waterfall spectrogram — general telemetry
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Native rosbridge + MQTT adapters
Live demo: https://jayasaikishanchapparam.github.io/altara/demo/ GitHub: https://github.com/JayaSaiKishanChapparam/altara
Would love feedback from people actually building ROS2 monitoring interfaces — what’s missing, what’s broken, what you’d actually use.
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Very cool library of components, @Jaya_Sai_Kishan !
As a potential adopter my main question would be: how do I know these will be maintained in the long-run? This question matters in robotics more than in other fields, simply because everything takes longer in robotics (hardware can’t suddenly “grow” 100x over night as software does) so you need to plan ahead for longer? (guess how many fielded robots still run on ROS 1!)
I believe it is this question that drive a lot of people in robotics to fork-and-self-maintain rather than depend on third-party maintainers, even for some well established (but poorly maintained) ROS packages. So I think overcoming that question is the main hurdle for open-source contributors like you and it is one of the reasons I so firmly believe that open-source needs a business model, especially in robotics. I started Transitive Robotics to offer just that (analogous to Android), and you are welcome to make your components available on the platform, especially if there are some “pro” extensions you could offer for a premium that would allow you to maintain all these components long-term, professionally.
I would also argue that it is because Foxglove has a solid business model that people are more likely to adopt it instead of some of the open-source alternatives such as rosboard. Free and open are great, but longevity is actually much more important when building a complex stack. Otherwise, well, we all know this picture:
